You walk into the room, squat on your couch, pull out the soda and the big pack of popcorn – XL, the week has been tough and you’ve indulged yourself – and get ready to enjoy that movie for the next hour and an hour. half. what your colleagues at the office keep telling you. It’s been humming since Monday and you bought your ticket with very high expectations.

You want to see the heroes.

You want to hear them.

If the movie is in 3D—weird, really—maybe you can almost feel how you’re touching them.

However… And smell them?

For example, if there is an explosion, why not smell the smoke and gunpowder? And if the characters are walking on the beach, why not feel the sea breeze as you can hear the waves?

See, hear… and smell

It may seem like a crazy question, but for aroma buff Hans Laube it made a lot of sense in the world in the 1930s. The idea was promising and ultimately not entirely new: in some rooms the Family Theater in Forest City, Pennsylvania had already tried spraying audiences with perfumes related to the show they enjoyed.

By then, attempts to aromatize the public had passed. without sadness or glory, but Laube believed that with the right approach, they could enrich the experience. His goal was not to make the rooms smell like roses or lilacs by giving a funny nod to what the audience saw on stage. No. What Laube wanted was much more ambitious: Fragrances to advance the plot, to reinforce and enrich it, just like music or visual effects.

What I wanted was a full-fledged aroma music. And that’s exactly what made the difference with previous trials or later systems like AromaRama.

With much enthusiasm from the sources, he devised a system for the World’s Fair in New York in 1939: Scentovision, a manual device that attaches directly to the audience’s seats and allows scents to diffuse through the projection room.

The aroma of a cigarette, which the detective was smoking, spread. Standing in front of the window of a patisserie, while the public was overflowing with the smell of freshly baked dough. the idea was good but it didn’t work. Scentovision didn’t get enough attention and Laube had to put it in the drawer.

At least for a while.

This odd scent suggestion caught the attention of two well-known Hollywood filmmakers, father and son Mike Todd and Mike Todd Jr. They liked Laube’s idea so much that they soon agreed to make the most of it in a movie that would be released in 1960. Even the death of the father did not stop a project that already made clear its purpose in its name: ‘Scent of Mystery’.

The rudimentary device of the 30s has been polished and automated to complete the experience. There was no need to leave the scents one by one anymore, thanks to a perfect system, the scents were released and delivered to the audience. This 2.0 version of Scentovision was called Fragrance-O-Vision and, in an ingenious marketing game, the almost reinvention of cinema turned out to be the greatest technical advance since the advent of sound: “They moved first (1895)! Then they started talking (1927)! They stink now!” He enthusiastically preached the slogan “Smell-O-Vision”. promise.

And of course the expectation was created. Columnist Earl Wilson, shortly before his debut, said, “It can produce and instantly destroy any scent, from skunk to perfume!” he preached. The device aimed high, but unfortunately fell short.

The critics were trapped by the tape, they mocked Laube saw how he lost the second round in an attempt to fill the halls with aromas.

What went wrong? as he pointed out wiredWhat looked great on paper was difficult to put into practice in theaters. Depending on the location of the viewer, odors were detected with a delay or not at all, often giving the impression that the system was out of sync. In short: the experience was more like a stroll through a drugstore than the serene olfactory story Laube had dreamed of. when in 2010 TIME produced a ranking of the 50 worst inventions in history that sneaked into the ill-fated Smell-O-Vision.

“Forget 3D: what the public really wants is to smell a movie. Mike Todd Jr., who financed the ill-fated Smell-o-Vision gimmick in 1960, thought it was a system that triggered a movie reel of bottled scents that were directed to the viewer in sync with the moments in the movie. release. The only film to use Smell-o-Vision was the 1960s film ‘Scent of Mystery’, written with a particularly catchy gimmick. The results were, as expected, lousy and Smell-o-Vision was never used again,” he joked. made magazine.

Was it a complete failure? not at all.

Maybe Laube’s invention didn’t work, but he has since planted a seed that has sprouted anew in variations on other occasions. In the 1980s, John Waters wanted to explore the same universe of scents, albeit with a much simpler formula on a technical level: The movie ‘Polyester’ contained an ‘Odorama’, a strip with numbered boxes that the viewer had to draw and smell. received information from the screen. In a nostalgic nod to film history, even MTV applied a similar system during its 1992 revival of ‘Scent of Mystery’.

even today continues to be discovered The path that Laube took nearly 90 years ago. There are devices that ask us to smell our video games or what we see on our televisions. Olorama Technology aims to create an immersive experience in any visual format thanks to fragrance, and there are even companies working to bring flavor to the Metaverse.

After all, you know, if we could see and listen to the fiction…Why don’t you smell?