The World's Greatest Magic


The World's Greatest Magic was a series of American television specials showcasing magic acts.
The first of five shows was broadcast by NBC in 1994, and continued with annual editions through 1998. These shows were most often first telecast during the Thanksgiving holidays when special programming would occur. These specials reran occasionally on ABC Family from October 1996 to early 2002.
The first episode was hosted by Robert Urich, the second by Alan Thicke, and the final three episodes by John Ritter. All of the specials were narrated by Don LaFontaine. During specials II, III, IV, and V, before each commercial break of every episode, in a segment known as the Mac King School of Magic, Mac King showed viewers a simple magic trick, and would break its steps down after the commercial break so that the audience could perform the same trick for family and friends. The first special featured the same teach-a-trick segments which involved some of the various magicians featured in the special, along with a special guest celebrity.
Below is a list of the closing illusions for each of the five shows, and the magicians who performed them:
The producer of this series, Gary Ouellet, released a booklet entitled 'Music for Magicians', in which the music selection and editing process for this show was explained.
Few of the performers could use their regular performance music, because synchronization rights are usually too costly for commercial tracks. Two exceptions were Topas from WGM I, who used 'Hello Again' by the Cars, and Jeff McBride, who had music specially written for him by Jordan Rudess.
Hence, for the first two specials, the performers taped the show using their normal music, and a new audio track had to be created for broadcast, consisting of custom music created for each performer, and a re-creation of the audience applause. In some cases, it was known that the ambient sounds/applause would be important to a particular performer, and those acts were performed without music, so that custom music could be cleanly inserted in post-production.
Prior to making WGM III, Ouellet had to use production music as a last-minute scoring option on another magic production, and subsequently he decided to make WGM III entirely using production music, for which he searched through 15,000 'cuts'. Each performer's music track was specially created from at least one library track, with stingers, hits and various accentuating effects from . Hence, WGM 3-5 were taped live with the pre-prepared music tracks.
The following tracks have been identified as being used within the noted performers' sets:
WGM III:
WGM IV:
WGM V: