alternatehistory.com

"One of the more curious fad gimmicks of the period was Smell-O-Vision, a process initiated in 1960 by Mike Todd, Jr., son of the famed showman. Mike Todd, Sr. had entertained the world with his massive production of AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (1956), but sadly, perished in a plane crash in 1958. Todd, Jr. invested his inheritance in the development of Smell-O-Vision, a process in which evocative smells were pumped to the cinema audience through pipes leading to individual seats in the auditorium. Bottles of scent were held on a rotating drum and the process was triggered by a signal on the film itself. Only one film, SCENT OF A MYSTERY, was made in Smell-O-Vision and was far from a milestone in movie history. Mike Todd, Jr. lost his entire investment and left the film business. As an added audience incentive, Eddie Fisher, best friend of Mike Todd, Sr. and, at the time, the husband of Todd's widow, Elizabeth Taylor, sang the memorable theme song from SCENT OF A MYSTERY. Filmmaker, John Waters, paid homage to Smell-O-Vision with his 1980 film, POLYESTER. Waters created the process of Odorama and, rather than pumping in scents, used individual audience 'Scratch and Sniff' cards." http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/belknap/exhibit2002/smell.htm

Scent of a Mystery had perhaps my favorite advertising slogan of all time, referring to the history of movies:

FIRST They Moved
THEN They Talked
NOW They Smell

You can see the ad at http://www.radosh.net/archive/002818.html

See Mike Todd, Jr.'s own comment:

FIR: Something you didn't get around to discussing in your book, which I'd love to ask you about, is Smell-O-Vision.

Todd: The funny thing about the process is that Bill Doll, Dad's press agent, and then mine for that project, had an idea that would have saved the damned thing if we' d thought of it before the film opened. And that was to reverse the pump. It sucked air back, so that there was no overhang on the previous smell. Otherwise it just sort of drifted in between smells. It wasn't over powering, but just enough not to make the clearest delineation. Bill got this idea after the third opening. It was used, and
it worked perfectly, but by that time the ship had sailed. http://www.in70mm.com/news/2004/todd_jr/interview/index.htm

So let's say that, thanks to Bill Doll's idea being adopted earlier, Smell-O-Vision works. (It might also help if Scent of a Mystery were a better movie.) It is used in more and more films. (True, in that same interview, Mike Todd, Jr. himself made it clear that he had never thought that it could really catch on: "FIR: Did it seem to you at the time that this had the potential to be something like Cinerama." "Todd: No. It was just a novelty gimmick. Maybe, if it was a gigantic hit, you might make a second film, and at the most, a third, but that would have been it." But probably some of the pioneers of sound in films thought that was just a gimmick, too...) Eventually audiences consider odorless films to be as old-fashioned at a theater as black-and-white or silent movies. A controversy develops over the "odorizing" of pre-1960 movies (film purists deplore the practice)...

(That it was hard to transfer the idea to television was part of the idea: it would be one more reason, just like wider screens, for sometimes going out to the movies instead of watching them all on TV.)
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