Ninja Skills you can Teach Your Kids (or How to Combat a Rampaging Watermelon!)

Did you know you can throw a playing card powerfully enough to slice through vegetables, stick in drywall, or even break glass?!

If you are lucky then you might have come across people doing tricks throwing playing cards but if you haven’t then this might all seem very far-fetched. Afterall, they are little pieces of card! For most of us, if we have even ever tried throwing them, then they flutter a foot or so and land on the floor.

If you don’t believe me then you can look it up: the longest ever throw of a playing card was done by Rick Smith Jr. and it was 216 feet, 4 inches. For comparison, that’s over 2 thirds of a football pitch. (he also holds the record for the highest throw and the most throws on target – 50 out of 52 cards hit a 5 inch diameter target!)

What most people don’t know, even if they have come across this insane skill by seeing Rick Smith Jr. or others doing amazing, bonkers things, is that it originally came to popularity (in the Western world, anyway) in the 1800’s and then pretty much disappeared for about 100 years…

Not gunslingers, card slingers!

So, back in the days of the Wild West, stage magicians would tour around the country performing at different theatres and dancehalls. They’d only be at a venue for a short time and the more people came through the door, the more money they made (or the more likely they would be welcomed back). Even if they weren’t travelling, they needed to use one show to get hired for their next.

Just like today, they would get flyers printed to promote themselves and the show, but as anyone who has promoted an event will know, if you hand someone a flyer, their next act will likely be to drop it or at best stick it in their pocket and forget about it.

How could they make sure people not only kept the flyers, but actively went and showed it to their friends? Well, first, by making them collectable souvenirs, then by making them part of the act. They could get a few people up onto stage during the act and make sure they felt special and much more inclined to tell their friends but how could they get everyone super-excited to spread the word? That is where ‘card scaling’ was born.

How to Use Playing Cards in a Street Fight

It started as a way to impressively distribute promotional cards throughout a hall, getting them right to the back was impressive and memorable enough to make sure people went away excited to show their friends. But magicians are inventive and resourceful people by nature and the skill soon became a greater part of the act.

However, over the years it seemed to get a little lost. Maybe the acts just evolved towards the larger spectacles like sawing a person in half rather than close up card magic, perhaps especially with the advent of on-screen shows, throwing cards no-longer seemed that impressive (or for that matter, useful). Either way, the skill went largely dormant until Ricky Jay, a magician and actor, revived it in the 1970's and '80's.

He published his playful book ‘Cards as Weapons’ in 1977 and demonstrated incredible skills on TV through the 80’s. This included establishing the world record distance throw of 190 feet, flying at 90mph which he held until Rick Smith Jr. came along.

What was that? A Card Throwing Machine-Gun?!

Yep, you read that right.

When I first came across this stuff over 10 years ago, it was just a cool thing I thought I’d have a go at. I’m no master, but it is not actually the hardest skill to learn at a basic level and with a bit of body awareness from martial arts training, I was quickly able to throw with a lot of power.

I hadn’t done it much for a while but then my son (now 10) recently got really into watching Mark Rober on Youtube. If you haven’t come across him, he is a former NASA engineer who does bonkers things while teaching you to understand the science behind what he is doing. It’s a lot of fun!

In watching his stuff, my son found a video where he’d made a card throwing machine gun and, overhearing what it was about, my wife said “You should show that to your dad.”

We watched it together and it was none other than Rick Smith Jr. going head-to-head against the machine gun in a range of card throwing challenges. How freaking cool is that?!

So, if you want to have some fun with your kids, teach them some crazy ninja skills, and maybe even spark an interest in science, then check it out.

That Rampaging Watermelon…?

If you have watched the videos then you probably will have spotted where this comes from. Watermelons are big and, on the inside, pretty soft. They make good targets for card throwing. But actually with a bit of practice you can use all sorts of things. Here’s an old hunk of Gallia Melon my son and I were using the other day when we saw it had gone past being edible.

To start with (and a less messy option!) some cardboard tubes you can knock down are a lot of fun.

If you fancy trying it yourself, here’s a little tip I only discovered after I had been practicing for a while: you want to get Poker-sized cards. Regular cards are narrower and because of this, fly in more of an elliptical path so it is much harder to be accurate with them (though still plenty of fun!).

Here's a great 'how to' video where Rick is teaching Mark which not only shows you how, but shows that you can learn the basics pretty fast:

Learn this skill and teach your kids and, when the zombie-fruit apocalypse comes, you’ll know everyone in your house will be armed and dangerous with only a pack of playing cards in their pocket!