The audience was real for the Statue of Liberty. The “magic” was developing ball bearings smooth enough to allow the audience’s seating to be turned without them noticing, in order to give them the same view as the television audience.

it was still pretty boring TV, honestly. Being in the audience in person was probably more thrilling. As a child, it seemed like a stupid trick to me even without knowing how he did it -- that's it? I guessed some kind of mirrors or something. Maybe I wasn't smart enough as a 9-year-old to realize how hard it would be to fool the in-person audience? It didn't seem hard to me.

I watched it when it originally aired and agree it was surprisingly unimpactful on TV. Interesting backstory: I know someone who worked on the creative team for that TV special and while developing new illusion concepts, they brainstormed the idea of making the moon disappear from the night sky (as verified by a live audience augmented with astronomers with telescopes and a laser). However, they realized the concept of that effect was "too big" to play well to television audiences.

It's an interesting thought that a magic trick concept can be 'too amazing'. I think the Statue of Liberty was still 'too big' of a concept, at least for a television performance. Copperfield's illusion titled "Flying" is also really interesting in this regard. As both a magician and magical inventor, I think it's a terrific effect and Copperfield presented it beautifully. It's also one of the more difficult effects I've ever seen him do, both technically and physically. It's visually stunning, yet it just doesn't seem to have as strong of an impact on audiences as it should.

Levitating a person has long been one of the most challenging and popular stage illusions. Over the last 150 years it's been done dozens of different ways - with my personal favorite being the Asrah levitation invented by Servais Le Roy and first performed in 1902. Arguably, the Flying illusion, which was invented by legendary illusion creator Johnny Gaughan for Copperfield, is the ultimate 'perfect' levitation. It achieves levitation in its most ideal, unconstrained form yet somehow fails to 'connect' strongly with audiences. Understanding why it doesn't is one of those fascinating puzzles magical inventors debate over beer. Sometimes figuring out if you should do an effect is even harder than figuring out how to do it.

Disclaimer: I'm not super into magic, and I don't know what David Copperfield's "flying" looks like.

I think probably it's just too similar looking to easier tricks. A magician/enthusiast can appreciate the craft of the trick and the difficulty in executing it, a naive audience member is probably just thinking "Well it's wires somehow, I just don't know how," which is less exciting than "Wait I genuinely have no idea what on earth is going on here I could have sworn that ball was somewhere else."

We see singers and acrobats and circus clowns "flying", and while I'm sure it's vastly less impressive to anyone that knows what's going on, from four-hundred feet away it just doesn't actually look all that different.

My other (very speculative) suspicion is that I think object permanence is a pretty old, primitive part of our brains. They've done studies showing toddlers, and even a lot of animals, get confused when you clearly demonstrate violations of object permanence (e.g. put a ball in a tube and have it come out the other end, then put in another identical ball and it doesn't come out). I suspect tricks that make an object disappear or transport or duplicate or some other seeming nonsense have an easier time having a big impact because they're legible enough to impress a dog, and an audience full of cocktails isn't that different from a dog, when you get down to it.

Edit: and you said levitating has long been a very popular illusion, so maybe this wasn't the case in the past; I would suggest maybe modern audiences are just more familiar with wires/stage "flight" from other performers, or even, like, The Matrix. But again, I'm speaking from no knowledge, just thinking.

> probably just thinking "Well it's wires somehow, I just don't know how,"

Yes, I agree this is likely a big component. It's interesting to ponder why "less pure" versions of levitation get bigger reactions. You can see Flying here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=112EIHu5gFc. What I like about the Flying illusion is that it is basically just a guy dangling on a wire. The artistry is in how Copperfield packages the presentation from the story-telling upfront to elevate the significance to the 'proof points' to eliminate audience suspicion like passing hoops over him and flying into a human sized glass fish tank with a lid (which each involve a lot of cleverness). It must've taken an enormous amount of practice to develop the body control that transforms it from "a guy dangling on a wire" to someone flying gracefully.

> object permanence is a pretty old, primitive part of our brains

Indeed. This is why close-up coin magic has always been my focus.