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STORY In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road.” Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen. With MAGIC TRIP, Oscar®-winning director Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood were given unprecedented access to this raw footage to create a documentary of this extraordinary piece of American history.

STARRING Ken Kesey Neal Cassady The Merry Band of Pranksters The Grateful Dead

DIRECTED BY Alison Ellwood Alex Gibney

PRODUCED BY Will Clarke Alex Gibney Alexandra Johnes

• © 2013 Magnolia Pictures. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place

2011, Documentary, 1h 30m

What to know

Critics Consensus

Magic Trip is overall unenlightening, though there's an inherent novelty and joy in seeing the unearthed footage of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters. Read critic reviews

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Magic trip: ken kesey's search for a kool place   photos.

Directors Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood present footage culled from a road trip to the 1964 New York World's Fair, which author Ken Kesey and the Merry Band of Pranksters made while on drugs.

Rating: R (Some Nudity|Language|Drug Content)

Genre: Documentary

Original Language: English

Director: Alex Gibney , Alison Ellwood

Producer: Will Clarke , Alex Gibney , Alexandra Johnes

Writer: Alex Gibney , Alison Ellwood

Release Date (Theaters): Aug 5, 2011  limited

Release Date (Streaming): Oct 4, 2016

Box Office (Gross USA): $153.9K

Runtime: 1h 30m

Distributor: Magnolia Pictures

Production Co: Magnolia Pictures

Cast & Crew

Stanley Tucci

Alex Gibney

Alison Ellwood

Will Clarke

Alexandra Johnes

David McKillop

Executive Producer

Molly Thompson

Robert Belau

David Kowitz

Gareth Wiley

Film Editing

News & Interviews for Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place

Critics Consensus: Rise of the Planet of the Apes is Certified Fresh

Critic Reviews for Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place

Audience reviews for magic trip: ken kesey's search for a kool place.

On a visit to New York City in 1963 to attend the premiere of the stage version of his novel "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest," Ken Kesey witnesses the construction of the World's Fair site and starts to plan a cross country trip the following year when it will be opened.(What? No Mets game in the new stadium?) At the same time, as Kirk Douglas recalls in his autobiography "The Ragman's Son," Kesey was already showing the tell-tale signs of taking LSD that he had begun as part of a government experiment a few years previously. That would provide the fuel for his friends on the journey, The Merry Pranksters, in a converted school bus, driven by the legendary Beat Neal Cassady who would be fueled by speed. As I recall from reading "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe(strangely not mentioned here even though it covers the same territory) in high school(Did I ever mention that I had the coolest history teacher ever?), the filmed footage which makes up the bulk of the documentary "Magic Trip" was brought up. At the time, that footage was not edited down into a manageable length and we can clearly see why as most of it looks so rough that it should come as no surprise that it was filmed by amateurs on drugs, with the exception of the World's Fair footage which looks cool. The documentary uses after the fact interviews to piece it all together and it sort of works to make a case for Kesey and his friends being not only a second generation Beats, but also the root genesis of the hippies. However, in the end, we only find out the fates of Kesey and Cassady and the divergent directions their lives would take them.

"Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place" Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood's road, LSD, counterculture documentary Magic Trip is a film that is hard to wrap my head around. I can't really gather my feelings toward the film. Did I like it? Yeah, I guess I did. Why did I like it? I have no idea. Maybe it is that I love seeing footage and hearing stories about the 60's and the counterculture. Maybe it is that I love Gibney's approach to his documentaries(If your at all a fan of documentaries, his is a name you should know). Maybe it is because Ken Kesey is such an interesting human being. In the end, I just liked the film and who cares why. Magic Trip is about "a long, strange trip" from California to New York. On the surface it is about a road trip with a bunch of eccentric people who have their own views on the world, and express them through the use of LSD and by painting up their bus and playing music on top of it as they drive through city after city. At its core though, the film is about the start to the hippy, counterculture that the 60's is so well known for. At the time that Kesey and his friends set out for New York, there was a lot of change going on in the world. The Civil Rights movement was just starting to take shape. The hippy generation was coming to the forefront. So I guess if asked what this movie was really about, you could say, "Change." But wondering what it is about isn't what it's about. What was the counterculture movement about? It was about change. There's a lot of stuff going on in Magic Trip that won't be for everyone. It's presented in a kind of hallucinatory way. There are moments when we are supposedly in a trip right alongside all the people on the bus. We see colors flash across the screen and see people going crazy as they battle a "bad trip." The movie also comes off as disorganized and free formed. If you think about it, that was the only way to tackle a movie about this "trip." The counterculture movement was very freeform, so presenting this story in a disorganized way makes sense. Still, it could be off putting for some. I just look at this film, not as a sensical documentary like most of us are used to, but as an excursion into a time I can only see through pictures and videos. The 60's were all about change and the only way for me to experience it all is in films like this. As it is, this is a film that is more than it seems. It's also extremely interesting, even if we don't get the point of it all.

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Cast & Crew

Jack Kerouac

Grateful Dead

Allen Ginsberg

Alex Gibney

• DOCUMENTARY
• Average 6.3

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Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place

A freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' fabled road trip across America. A freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' fabled road trip across America. A freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' fabled road trip across America.

• Alison Ellwood
• Alex Gibney
• Stanley Tucci
• Timothy Leary
• 8 User reviews
• 50 Critic reviews
• 59 Metascore
• 1 nomination

• (archive footage)

• Jane Burton

• Gretchen Fetchen

• (as The Warlocks)
• Self - Interviewer

• Stark Naked

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia Martin Scorsese 's film foundation helped fund the repair of the damaged Kesey footage by technicians from UCLA, who labored for over a year. Synching up the film to its separate snippets of audio track proved so daunting that director Alison Ellwood resorted to hiring a lip reader to determine what words people were mouthing.

Ken Kesey : What it meant, was that everybody had to consider a new way for things to be. Don't you know that we're all one? The deeper I got into it, the more I realized it was a different force working. The only big mistake we made, as a force, was thinking for a while that we were going to win. We developed vested interests in the victory to come. We begin to parcel off into little groups, whether it's feminism or politics. For money, religion, whatever it is; everybody is jumping up and down in front of it. Until nobody can see it clear anymore. There's something about what we're doing; is that we're meant to lose, every time. You make these forays, you write these books and you perform this music; but the big juggernaut of civilization continues, and you get kind of brushed to the side. But, I think all through history there's been these kind of divine losers that just take a deep breath and go ahead, knowing that society's not going to understand it. Not even caring, 'cause they're having a good time.

• Connections Featured in The Roth Show: The New York City Way (2014)
• Soundtracks Let's Go Trippin' Written by Dick Dale (as D. Dale) Published by Surf Beat Music Performed by Dick Dale & His Del-Tones (as Dick Dale and the Del-tones) Courtesy of Dick Dale Records

User reviews 8

• Oct 17, 2011
• How long is Magic Trip: Ken Kesey's Search for a Kool Place? Powered by Alexa
• August 5, 2011 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official site
• Magnolia Pictures
• History Films
• Optimum Releasing
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Aug 7, 2011

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 47 minutes
• Black and White
• Dolby Digital

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Magic Trip is 6068 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 4718 places since yesterday. In the United Kingdom, it is currently more popular than Angela but less popular than Good Chemistry: The Story of Elemental.

A freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankster’s fabled road trip across America in the legendary Magic Bus. In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus.

Streaming Charts The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

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Magic Trip (2011) Streaming: Watch & Stream Online via Amazon Prime Video

By Ritika Singh

If you are wondering where to watch and Magic Trip (2011) , then we have all the streaming details. The musical documentary traces the footage of the exciting road journey to the 1964 New York World’s Fair focusing made by noted author Ken Kesey and the Merry Band of Pranksters. It received highly positive reviews from critics, who praised

Here’s how you can watch and stream Magic Trip (2011) via streaming services such as Amazon Prime Video.

Is Magic Trip (2011) available to watch via streaming?

Yes, Magic Trip (2011) is available to watch via streaming on Amazon Prime Video .

The film is directed by Alex Gibney and Alison Edwood and produced by Gibney along with Gareth Wiley. It sheds light on the ambiguous and strange journey of author Ken Kesey and a cheerful band of pranksters across the United States while they’re on drugs.

The star cast features Ken Kessey, Stanley Tucci, Ken Babbs, Timothy Leary, Jack Kerouac, Jim Meskimen, and many others.

Watch Magic Trip (2011) streaming via Amazon Prime Video

Magic Trip (2011) is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video.

Amazon Prime Video is a subscription-based streaming service offering a vast selection of movies, TV shows, and original content. Some of the most critically acclaimed TV shows that viewers can stream on the platform are The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

You can watch via Amazon Prime Video by following these steps:

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Amazon Prime is the online retailer’s paid service that provides fast shipping and exclusive sales on products, so the membership that includes both this service and Prime Video is the company’s most popular offering. However, you can also opt to subscribe to Prime Video separately.

Magic Trip’s synopsis is as follows:

”A freewheeling portrait of Ken Kesey and the Merry Prankster’s fabled road trip across America in the legendary Magic Bus. In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus.”

NOTE: The streaming services listed above are subject to change. The information provided was correct at the time of writing.

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'Magic Trip': High Times With The Merry Pranksters

Mark Jenkins

Road Warriors: Timothy Leary (left) and Neal Cassady, the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road , were two of the Merry Pranksters onboard the psychedelic "Further" bus in 1964. Magic Trip tries to immortalize their journey to a larger extent than the film is able to support. Allen Ginsberg/Corbis hide caption

• Directors: Alex Gibney, Alison Ellwood
• Genre: Documentary
• Running Time: 107 minutes

Rated R for drug content, language and some nudity

With: Stanley Tucci, Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, The Merry Pranksters, The Grateful Dead

Watch Clips

Credit: Magnolia Pictures

'John Babbs'

'Once I Hit The Pond'

In the beginning was the word: Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , published in 1968, evocatively reconstructed Ken Kesey and the Merry Band of Pranksters' cross-country bus trip of four years earlier. The book remains one of the seminal accounts of the decade's social, artistic and hallucinogenic experiments.

Now come the images: Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood have built a documentary, Magic Trip , from the 16mm color film the Pranksters shot along the way. The rarely seen (and carefully restored) footage looks good, although the lack of synchronized sound gives it a home-movie feel. The travelers did record sound, but it rarely matched the film. So the directors rely on audio interviews with the participants, recorded a decade after the excursion.

For those already somewhat familiar with the subject, the directors' distillation of these 40 hours of film will expand their knowledge — if not their consciousness. But other viewers may spend the whole movie wondering exactly when the merry magic is going to kick in.

The sparse narration, voiced by Stanley Tucci, oversells the significance of what's on-screen. The movie's prologue claims that the Pranksters' journey "changed everything." But surely the tie-dyed escapade was a symptom, not a cause, of the era's burgeoning youth culture.

As Wolfe detailed, Kesey moved through multiple worlds. He was an all-American, small-town boy who became an acclaimed novelist at 27 with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest . He was an early advocate of LSD and other psychedelics, and a patron of the Grateful Dead. And though he considered himself "too young to be a beat," he knew Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and most of the rest. Indeed, the Pranksters' bus driver was Neal Cassady, the Kerouac pal lightly fictionalized as Dean Moriarty in On the Road .

The Pranksters' own on-the-road venture was roundabout, wandering through Southern climes that within a few years would be considered inhospitable to hippies. Yet the local cops were bemused rather than threatened by the strangers, whose bus was decorated in psychedelic swirls but whose hair and dress wasn't that unusual. At the time, some of the travelers' favorite drugs weren't even illegal; LSD wouldn't be prohibited nationwide until 1968. (Cassady preferred speed, which fueled both his long hours at the wheel and his manic raps.)

Ken Kesey's bus, "Further," was an emblem of '60s counterculture. Painted by hand (and foot), the vehicle served as a temporary home for Kesey and his fellow hippies. Ted Streshinsky/Corbis hide caption

Ken Kesey's bus, "Further," was an emblem of '60s counterculture. Painted by hand (and foot), the vehicle served as a temporary home for Kesey and his fellow hippies.

Many of the Pranksters acquired nicknames that pretty much tell their whole story: Stark Naked, for example, got really stoned and stood nude on the moving bus' back platform, to the delight of truck drivers. Other members of the troupe are similarly one-dimensional. To judge from this account, Kesey wasn't first among equals: He was basically the whole show.

Gibney (whose best documentary is the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side ) and Ellwood (his longtime editor) attempt to get inside the heads' heads with acid-simulating animations. They also interject clips from an LSD-peril episode of Dragnet and Hollywood's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , and illustrate the period's pop-culture shift with music that moves from silly ("Love Potion No. 9") to trippy ("Timothy's Leary's Dead").

It takes more such allusions, however, to conjure a fresh vision of the much-pondered 1960s. In the Pranksters' footage, Magic Trip does have something new. But the movie fails to make the cross-country jaunt function as a metaphor for the country's mid-century passage. Minus that, the Pranksters' everything-changing adventure looks a lot like just another road trip.

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Movie Review | 'Magic Trip'

Stoned Archive: Wild Ride Of the Merry Pranksters

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By Stephen Holden

• Aug. 4, 2011

If you have ever agreed to baby-sit for a friend who needed a sympathetic watchdog while experimenting with psychedelics, you know how boring it can be to observe someone else in the throes of an acid trip. Unless, heaven forbid, the friend freaks out and has to be carted off to a psych ward, there is nothing interesting about it, not even the addled oh-wow remarks of the person under the influence. Meaningful communication is possible only if you’ve also ingested hallucinogens and are flying side by side. Then you might share the clammy fantasy of crawling around inside each other’s heads.

That unbridgeable distance between the stoned and the sober is the problem with Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s documentary “Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place.” This distillation of home movies shot by the author Ken Kesey and his friends, known as the Merry Pranksters, chronicles their acid-fueled cross-country bus trip in 1964 from California to New York to visit the World’s Fair. Thanks partly to Tom Wolfe’s raised-eyebrow account, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” that bohemian lark has been retrospectively hailed as the flash point of the emerging hippie counterculture.

Compiled from more than 40 hours of 16-millimeter footage shot during the journey and stored in a barn near Eugene, Ore., “Magic Trip” is the cinematic equivalent of a yellowed scrapbook whose pictures are accompanied by sketchy captions created after the fact.

Because the Pranksters were too careless to synch the images with the sound, many of the movie’s voice-over reminiscences come from audiotapes recorded 10 years later, with the speakers haphazardly identified. Their accounts are supplemented with sparse narration by Stanley Tucci. None of the storytellers could be described as transfixing yarn spinners. Any philosophical afterthoughts are resoundingly banal.

With nicknames like Stark Naked, Intrepid Traveler, Mal Function, Gretchen Fetchin, Generally Famished and Zonker, the Pranksters suggest nothing so much as a group of attractive, preppy-looking partygoers, outfitted in red, white and blue, whose traveling bacchanal zigzags across the country, with each stop identified by a postcard.

In those more relaxed times, the Pranksters encountered only sporadic harassment. Their psychedelically painted vehicle, a 1939 International Harvester school bus that they christened Further, was an object more of curiosity than of hostility. In downtown Phoenix they mocked the presidential aspirations of Senator Barry Goldwater by driving the bus backward. Outside New Orleans they accidentally visited a beach for black people and fled in fear and embarrassment.

There is a minor uproar in Houston, where they visited the author Larry McMurtry in his staid, middle-class neighborhood, and the mentally unstable Stark Naked went missing. The Pranksters are also shown dancing around in a circle and playing instruments (badly) while imagining that they sound like John Coltrane, as well as splashing around in an Arizona pond while spontaneously inventing tie-dye (or so the movie suggests).

The World’s Fair proves to be a disappointment, as does a visit to the Millbrook, N.Y., estate where Timothy Leary reigned as the East Coast acid guru. This was not the euphoric, proto-hippie summit meeting they had anticipated, and Leary’s West Coast counterparts found themselves looked down on as frivolous.

The film begins with a biography of Kesey, a glamorous, blondish roughneck writer known for his novels “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Sometimes a Great Notion.” His college dreams of being an Olympic wrestler ended with a serious shoulder injury. The documentary includes a history of LSD and a re-creation of Kesey’s participation in a 1959 government study in which his moment-by-moment remarks after taking LSD were tape-recorded. (We hear his voice over a faked re-enactment.) The cheesy visual effects accompanying the sequence are meager compared with the full-blown psychedelia in Julie Taymor’s movie “Across the Universe.”

Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place

Opens on Friday in New York and San Francisco.

Written and directed by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood, based on the words and recordings of Ken Kesey; voice of the interviewer, Stanley Tucci; edited by Ms. Ellwood; music by David Kahne; design and animated sequences by Imaginary Forces; produced by Will Clarke, Mr. Gibney and Alexandra Johnes; released by Magnolia Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes.

Besides Kesey, the most famous Prankster was Neal Cassady, the speed-fueled motormouth who was the model for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and the principal driver for the journey’s West-to-East-Coast lap. Then in his late 30s, he was already a visibly ravaged shadow of Kerouac’s heroically defiant rebel and well on his way to becoming the kind of babbling burnout you don’t want to sit next to on any bus trip, magical or not.

“Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has nudity and drug taking.

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A leading independent film studio for 20 years, Magnolia Pictures is the theatrical and home entertainment distribution arm of the Wagner/Cuban Companies, boasting a library of over 500 titles.Recent releases include Sierra Pettengill’s kaleidoscopic all-archival documentary RIOTSVILLE, USA; SXSW Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award-winning comedy I LOVE MY DAD, starring Patton Oswalt; Concordia Studio and Wavelength’s sweeping American West documentary BITTERBRUSH; Martin Scorsese executive-produced documentary DREAMING WALLS: INSIDE THE CHELSEA HOTEL; stranger-than-fiction Sundance documentary MY OLD SCHOOL, starring Alan Cumming.

There There

Acclaimed filmmaker Andrew Bujalski (Support the Girls, Computer Chess) explores the precarious nature of human connection in There There, a round robin of emotional two-character vignettes in which seven people reach out and bond momentarily, setting the scene for the next encounter.

Next Exit follows a research scientist (Karen Gillan, AVENGERS) who makes national news proving she can track people into the afterlife - Rose (Katie Parker, THE MIDNIGHT CLUB) sees a way out and Teddy (Rahul Kohli, MIDNIGHT MASS) sees his chance to finally make it.

I LOVE MY DAD

Inspired by writer, director, and star James Morosini’s true life experience, I LOVE MY DAD follows Chuck (Patton Oswalt), a hopelessly estranged father who desperately wants to reconnect with his troubled son, Franklin (Morosini). Blocked on social media and concerned for his son’s life, Chuck impersonates a waitress online and starts checking in with Franklin.

With the summer sun beating down on her rural Spanish town, Sara hides away in her parent’s butcher shop. A teenager whose excess weight makes her the target of incessant bullying, she flees a clique of capricious girls who torment her at the town pool, only to stumble upon them being brutally kidnapped by a stranger, who drives off with them in his van.

Product Description

In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World's Fair. He was joined by "The Merry Band of Pranksters," including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac's "On the Road." Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen. With Magic Trip, Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood were given unprecedented access to this raw footage to create a documentary of this extraordinary piece of American history.

Product details

• MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ R (Restricted)
• Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 2.72 ounces
• Item model number ‏ : ‎ 22853942
• Director ‏ : ‎ Alison Ellwood, Alex Gibney
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ Color, Widescreen, Multiple Formats, Dolby, NTSC, Closed-captioned, Subtitled
• Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 47 minutes
• Release date ‏ : ‎ November 1, 2011
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Ken Kesey, Ken Babbs, Timothy Leary, The Grateful Dead, Neal Cassady
• Subtitles: ‏ : ‎ Spanish
• Producers ‏ : ‎ Will Clarke, Alexandra Johnes, Alex Gibney
• Studio ‏ : ‎ Magnolia Home Ent
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B005HI4LLO
• Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ USA
• Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
• #803 in Documentary (Movies & TV)
• #960 in Special Interests (Movies & TV)

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Magic Trip (2011)

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