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A German company called Cinescent has recently begun bombarding European movie screens with scented advertisements. The way it works is that viewers are subjected to an ad for Nivea sun cream (or whatever), while the smell of Nivea sun cream (or again, whatever) gets piped into the theatre through the air conditioning. Cinescent quizzed the moviegoers exiting the cinemas and found that viewers were 515 per cent more likely to remember the smelly ads than the normal ones. I'm not surprised. We're not (yet) used to commercials blowing smells at us, and if I received a pungent whiff of skin care products just as I was trying to tuck into a handful of popcorn, I'd remember the experience too.

This isn't the first time people have tried adding smells to the theatre-going experience. The practice actually goes all the way back to 1916, when a Pennsylvania theatre used an electric fan to blow rose-oil-scented air into the auditorium during a newsreel about the Rose Bowl game.

In 1959, a process called “AromaRama” was added to the feature film Behind the Great Wall (a.k.a. La Muraglia Cinese), a documentary about China. Chuck Weiss, the inventor of AromaRama, claimed he used over 100 distinct scents to perfume the film, including “...grass, earth, exploding firecrackers, a river, incense, burning torches, horses, restaurants, the scent of a trapped tiger and many more.” (The scent of a trapped tiger?! Egad!) Smells were piped in using the air conditioning system, just like Cinescent, only with a different scent puffing out every other minute. This is when audiences learned that, while adding smells to a bustling theatre is easy, getting the smells out is not. You can't enjoy the scent of fresh-cut flowers if you can still smell horses, firecrackers and trapped tigers, and by the end of the film, viewers were gagging on a miasma of conflicting odours.

Next came Scent of Mystery (1960), which was filmed using a new process called “Smell-O-Vision.” This technique used a system of vents underneath the seats to pipe in (and, more importantly, remove) various odours at key points in the film. Unlike Behind the Great Wall, this movie was actually filmed with the scent gimmick in mind, and the audience is supposed to guess the identity of the killer by the scent of pipe tobacco that accompanies him. Only three theatres (in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago) were installed with the requisite equipment and the film flopped badly enough that Smell-O-Vision was retired for good. The equipment eventually did exactly what it was supposed to do, but only after extensive fiddling late in the movie's run, and by then, complaints of late or undetectable scents had already brought bad word-of-mouth to the enterprise. The distributors tried to re-release Scent of Mystery in a shortened version without the smelly gimmick as Holiday in Spain, but the unscented version was plagued with surreal moments, such as characters thrusting loaves of freshly baked bread at the camera and then holding them there for no reason.

Scented movies (or “smellies”) vanished for a while after that, until the gimmick was resurrected by John Waters, for his film Polyester (1981). Filmed in “Odorama,” the movie has 10 separate odours, accompanied by a corresponding number flashing on the screen. When the audience sees the number, they scratch the numbered spot on their official Odorama scratch-and-sniff cards (handed out at the entrance to the theatre) and sniff away. The smells are:

1. Roses. This occurs during an introductory segment introducing the Odorama process. A pleasant smell, lulling the audience into a false sense of security before unleashing...

2. A Great Big Fart. C'mon, it's John Waters; you knew this was coming. I can just imagine a room full of people gagging, moaning and giggling at this one.

3. Model Airplane Glue. Umm... does that count as huffing? Is this legal?

4. Pizza. OK guys, it's safe to sniff again. All this one does is make your popcorn taste weird.

5. Gasoline.

6. Skunk. Damn it, Waters!

7. Natural Gas. Oh dear.

8. New Car Smell. I think I'll only scratch this one from now on.

9. Stinky Running Shoes. The film fakes you out with flowers, before substituting grody old sneakers. Pah!

10. Air Freshener. Kind of an apology to the audience.

The laserdisc and at least one version of the DVD release of Polyester included the Odorama card. Um... hooray?

Odorama returned in the theatrical release of Rugrats Go Wild (2003), although many viewers complained that the Odorama cards only smelled like cardboard. Waters was miffed at seeing his gimmick used without his permission. When Waters heard that the film was intended as an “homage,” he remarked that receiving a cheque would have been a much better homage.

Most recently in the world of “smellies,” NTT Communications apparently added seven smells to selected Japanese screenings of Terrence Malick's film The New World (2005). The device used to spread the odours was hooked up to the Internet, which must have been a tempting target for hackers. (“Moviegoers everywhere will tremble when I, $t!nk0man99, unleash the World's Largest Virtual Fart! Bwaaa ha ha ha ha haaaa!”)