As irritating as David Blaine has become in recent years due to his tedious, surprisingly lusterless stunt (un)spectaculars, whenever I'm flipping through the channels and stumble upon the 1996 documercial David Blaine: Street Magic, I put down the remote control. By now I've seen the Leonardo DiCaprio-hosted special enough times to know all the tricks, even if I can't explain how they're pulled off. And although I'm still impressed by Blaine's skill (I've always loved magic), the pure excitement I get from watching him turn an Ace of Diamonds into a 6 of Spades has long since passed. Meanwhile, Blaine's undoubtedly effective stage presence, from his monotone monologues to his dramatic exhaustion shtick, has become downright tiresome. Yet still I watch. The difference is that I no longer watch Blaine. The genius of Street Magic is that in addition to allowing us to observe Blaine's sleight of hand, the film also—and sometimes exclusively—allows us to watch the awed faces of Blaine's marks. No matter how many times I encounter Street Magic, the sight of people staring in absolute amazement as they try to process the apparent reality of the seemingly impossible is nothing short of thrilling.

Incredibly enough, that leads us to the latest documentary in ESPN Films' "30 for 30" series, The Birth of Big Air, which has nothing whatsoever to do with street magic but nonetheless has similar charms. Profiling a BMX daredevil named Mat Hoffman, the 50-minute film is peppered with moments in which Jeff Tremaine's camera stares into the dumbstruck faces of people trying to process stunts so incredible that they might as well be illusions. That some of the stunts happened as many as 24 years ago, and that many of the guys shaking their heads in amazement have performed numerous gravity-defying feats of their own, makes their present-day wonderment, captured in talking-head interviews, all the more poignant. It's one thing for a stuntman to dazzle in the moment. It's another thing to pull off tricks so incredible that a decade or two later people still get goosebumps remembering what it was like to discover photographs of the tricks in trade magazines. Mat Hoffman earned his fame, and served as a trailblazer for his sport, by doing things on a bike that no one else could. Hoffman earned his legend, however, by nailing tricks no one else even imagined.

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