A recent Wired headline reads “Researchers Want to Add Touch, Taste and Smell to Virtual Reality.” I detect the faint odor of wishful thinking. Here’s an original 1999 Retrofuture post that looks at the first attempt at Smell-O-Vision.
In the 1950s, Hans Laube, a Swiss professor of osmics (the study of smells) created a process for reproducing odors in a movie theater. The invention—which came to be known as Smell-O-Vision—was introduced in the 1960 film Scent of Mystery.
The idea of using smells in movies—i.e., making a “smellie”—had been a long-anticipated development in cinema. Newspaper advertisements for Scent of Mystery claimed its significance in film history: “First They Moved (1895)! Then They Talked (1927)! Now They Smell!”
Did Smell-O-Vision make olfactory sense? Not too many people thought so. But at least one influential backer did, Michael Todd Sr., the producer of Around the World in 80 Days, who first saw Laube demonstrate his invention in 1954.
Todd was a theatrical impresario, an Oscar-winning-producer, and a consummate showman who was interested in anything that might maintain an audience’s attention. Among the many movie techniques he helped pioneer was the wide-screen movie format known as Cinerama (Mike Todd, Jr. shot the winding, twisting, vertigo-inducing rollercoaster ride in 1952′s This is Cinerama).
Always on the lookout for the next innovation, the Todds caught a whiff of odor-meister Laube’s contraption which he called Scentavision. It was a match made in heaven. The “smellies,” like Aldous Huxley’s “feelies” in Brave New World, promised a total immersion in movie illusion.
Then tragedy struck. On March 22, 1958, Michael Todd, Sr. was killed in plane accident while scouting a filming location in New Mexico (Todd’s son and then-wife Elizabeth Taylor pictured right). For a time, it looked like Laube’s Scentavision might die with him. But Mike Todd, Jr. was determined to carry out his father’s dream. One year after Todd’s death, production of the first “smellie” began with plans to include 30 different fragrances by way of Laube’s Scentavision.
Todd, Jr. changed the name of the process to Smell-O-Vision. He explained why in Scent of Mystery’s souvenir program: “Many people have asked me why I re-named the Scentavision process Smell-O-Vision! They wonder why, if I was changing the name, I didn’t choose something more ‘dignified.’ I don’t understand how you can be ‘dignified’ about a process that introduces smells into a theater.”
It turns out there was something prophetic about Todd, Jr.’s words. Asking audiences to sit in a theater seat with a hidden tiny plastic tube pumping out the smell of coffee, garlic, freshly-baked bread, pipe smoke, and shoe-shine wax was neither dignified or, apparently, very fun. Initially the public seemed interested in Smell-O-Vision until they got a whiff of it. Then they left the theaters in droves.
Critics weren’t kind either. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, dismissed the “novel stimulation.” Crowther wrote, “when this reviewer saw (and smelled) the picture at a full-dress preview the night before last, the Smell-O-Vision squirters weren’t at full blast or his nasal apparatus was on the fritz.” The movie, he concluded, was “bunk.” A reviewer from Time seemed to concur: “Most customers will probably agree that the smell they liked best was the one they got during intermission: fresh air.”
Laube’s elaborately-constructed technique for sending out synchronized blasts of odor to match the action on screen seemed to elicit pinched noses from audiences as well. Word of mouth spread that Scent of Mystery was a bomb and it was yanked. Several years later, it was re-released under the title Holiday in Spain without the faintest trace of odor (as was “The Tale of Old Whiff,” the odor-filled cartoon which accompanied Scent of Mystery). Smell-O-Vision did not linger either. Twenty of Laube’s “smell brains” had been ordered. Now they were junked.
A significant footnote in the history of Smell-O-Vision is a copycat technique called AromaRama that was rushed out at the last second to cash in on the impending “smellomania.” In December, 1959, two months before the opening of Scent of Mystery, a travelogue of China called Behind the Great Wall made its premier in New York City. It featured 31 odors and a slogan: “You must breathe it to believe it!”
Like Smell-O-Vision, AromaRama used a “scent track” to trigger the film’s odors. But there was a crucial difference: AromaRama spread its odors through the theater’s air conditioning system with Freon gas used to diffuse the smells. Unfortunately, it didn’t diffuse all that well—pungent aromas often hung malodorously in the air in a less-than-pleasing way. “A beautiful old pine grove in Peking smells rather like a subway rest room on disinfectant day,” wrote Time.
Smell-O-Vision and AromaRama were doomed to obscurity, just like similarly-elaborate gimmicks which Hollywood executives put to use to lure TV audiences back into movie theaters in the 1950s. “Are smellies here to stay?” asked Time magazine in late 1959. “Or are they just another cinema gimmick that will soon be one with the paper goggles of yesteryear?”
In 1981, director John Waters (right) paid homage to the golden-age of legendary Hollywood gimmicks by presenting his latest film Polyester in glorious “Odorama.” Customers entering the movie theater were handed scratch’n'sniff cards and instructed to release the hidden smells at the specially-chosen moments. People familiar with Water’s oeuvre understood the highly dubious nature of this gimmick. Surprisingly, except for a few pungent aromas like the smell of dirty socks, Odorama didn’t leave a bad scent and Polyester became Water’s first commercial success.
As virtual reality technology continues to improve, the aromatic experience will improve as well and extend the viewer’s overall range of perceptions. One thing is for sure: more and more movies will stink on purpose.
