Daniel Sylvester Battagline was a classically trained artist, magician, inventor, cartoonist, animator, and storyteller. He designed posters for Amazing Johnathan and John Carney. He also designed my logo, storyboards, a comic book catalog of my products, and a full-size cartoon car for one of my shows. He loved the music of Tom Waits.
Danny was constantly creating new effects and put many of them on the market. Some of them include the Appearing 10-Foot Pole, Makin’ Sparks, the Sylvester Pitch, the Volcano, the Appearing Sledgehammer, and the Appearing and Vanishing Baseball Bat. He worked in all kinds of mediums and had remarkable skills in the workshop. He was really a great tinkerer.
Sylvester the Jester, as a character, was wacky, wonderful, and as original as you can get. The act was filled with funny, eye-popping magic. He was a living cartoon. He had a bright red jacket and a very stylized and oversized purple hat. His voice was exactly what you would expect from a cartoon. He had real-time sound effects emitting from himself accompanying every movement. His eyes would pop out of his head! Steam would shoot out of his ears! He did crazy things no live performer ever did and was immensely entertaining.
I first met Danny around 1984. He was this eccentric young man with some very original effects. He had a whimsical style with a big bright smile that was infectious. You could tell he was having just as much fun as the audience.
The first thing he showed me was his crazy comb manipulation. This full-sized plastic comb literally danced like electricity at his fingertips, vanishing and reappearing in the blink of an eye. I soon found out that this effect was the tip of the iceberg. He was a prolific creator of new and original magic that, after some time, would alter the DNA of magic. Danny was also very generous with his ideas and was a great brainstorming partner. He enjoyed the process and made it fun. He was a very deep thinker about the how and why magic should be performed.
In 2000, I asked Danny to perform in my full show at a theater in Seoul, Korea, for 14 months. It was a delight. It was an opportunity to make some of the crazy ideas from our notebooks and get them onto the stage. One effect was that, at the end of his act, a large safe would fall from the ceiling onto Danny. The front door would then open and a three-foot tall Sylvester the Jester would emerge.
He also created a sleight-of-hand system called the Sylvester Pitch. It is a very deceptive technique and I’m not 100% sure why it works. We had a fun game that we would play occasionally when we were out having dinner with friends. He would face a group of friends and just keep magically producing strange and unrelated objects. I was behind him secretly loading items into his hand for him to produce. He never knew what was coming next, so each production was a surprise to him, too.
Danny was mentored by Larry Jennings, and Dai Vernon called him a genius. He won many awards around the world, the pinnacle of which was a Creative Fellowship from the Academy of Magical Arts in 2023.
Danny is survived by his wife Sharon Tani, their twins Dino and Desiree, and his sister Detta Perone. His greatest contribution to this world was to spread joy. He did it every day with his empathy, love, friendship, humor, and art. He was loved and will be missed by many.
