the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

OOPS 98
maintain that with few exceptions, almost any smell can be produced and
sent out to the audience, and furthermore, any theater equipped for sound
can handle the odors, which are synchronized with the action of the picture
just as the sound is.” The New York Times was a bit more reserved,
noting that audiences thought the film’s simulated bacon aroma didn’t
quite seem real, but that the incense was on the mark.
Laube returned to the United States in 1944 intending to market a
version of his smell-producing technology to the nascent medium of television.
Laube claimed that he could produce five hundred different scents
with a small, inexpensive gadget that could be installed inside a TV set. A
1946 United Press account of Laube’s demonstration of “Scentovision” in
a New York hotel suite depicted him as laconic and wary about revealing
too much about his invention. Nevertheless, the correspondent came away
impressed: “Laube has one view of a circus at work which gives off such
realistic odors that his audience almost always lets out a yell and runs for
the window.”
In 1955, Laube set up his apparatus at the Cinerama- Warner Theatre
at Forty-seventh and Broadway in Manhattan. He filmed a ten-minute
pi lot film, with seventeen different odors, to show to test audiences. Nevertheless,
for reasons lost to history, the televi sion industry passed on
Laube’s invention. The inventor also approached supermarkets with the
idea of projecting slides of oranges, smoked ham, and chocolate pie, accompanied
by the appropriate scents, as a way to entice shoppers. But
that, too, proved fruitless.
The Sweet Smell of Excess
Laube finally found a patron in Michael Todd Jr., the son of fl amboyant
Broadway and Hollywood producer Michael Todd. The elder
Todd, who today is best remembered as one of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands,
had put on a series of successful musical spectaculars at the same
world’s fair at which Laube first exhibited his experimental smell movie.
A decade and a half later, Todd and his collaborator-son were looking at