Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, Jerry's here, and the three of us when you put us together, smell like cotton candy. Little known fact about Stuff you should Know.
You know what? I gave my daughter cotton candy, first time she's ever had it, candy floss, just a couple of weeks ago at the zoo. I was like, you never had cotton candy. I was like, give me some of that. I want to see. I haven't had it in so long. And boy, it's just that the nostalgic blast of that stuff melting on your tongue. Did not enjoy it.
I was like, Jesus, oh really, no, it's a gross web flavor. Was it like regular cotton candy flavor? Do they try to? Okay, the blue is the same as the pink. I don't like where this is going.
We had a cotton candy machine as a kid growing up, A little do it at home deal.
What yeah, okay, money bags?
Yeah no, trust me, this is like a five ninety nine years item.
I'm sure did you have the Snoopy Snowcome machine too.
No. See, we couldn't afford that because I had a name brand. I think you and I were both very famous for having very unbranded childhoods.
It's true, but we didn't have any kind of cotton candy machine.
Yeah, we were generic family kids.
So what about your cotton candy machine and your kid? Did you overdo it? Is that what you're saying?
No, no, no, I just wanted to throw that in there.
I wanted to show off.
I told Ruby that I had one when I was a kid. She's like, really, yeah, And I said, yeah. It was gross and it only made white candy.
Oh so it didn't taste at all.
No, just spin this. The taste doesn't come from the food coloring.
I don't know that that's true. Should we talk about smell of vision? Yeah, okay, I forgot. We hadn't even mentioned it yet. We're talking about smellovision, which is exactly what it sounds like. It was a really neat, interesting gimmick that was tried in the beginning the advent of the nineteen sixties. Most people say where they tried to accompany motion pictures with smells in the exact same way that they accompany motion pictures with sounds. That's right, Like
you put sound in moving pictures together. It's just so intuitive, and it's come so far that the world that we live in, you can't really imagine it. Otherwise, even if you've seen the artist, it's still tough to imagine. Right. They were trying to do that but with sense, and this is the first attempt, and unfortunately it was not a very successful attempt, which is why we don't have smell a vision today.
That's right. Dave old Pell helps us out with this, and this is kind of a fun surprise. One of our old house Stuff Works writers. Patrick didn't work in the office with this, but he was one of our longtime freelancers. Patrick Kaiger wrote a book like eighteenish years ago called Poplarica Colon a popular history of the fads, Mavericks,
inventions and lore that shaped modern America. Yeah, and I think did such a good job with the smellvision section that La Times writer Martin J. Smith again like seventeen or eighteen years ago, wrote an article about smellvision and used Patrick's book a lot. So we also relied on this stuff, and it was I want to check out that book. It sounds cool.
Yeah, it's a very good article or chapter I guess that they excerpted in. It's basically the definitive story of smell avision because it's such a it's such a narrow story. There's a few characters, and it happened in like this really narrow time frame. It's just it has a story. It's one of those those topics. It just has its own story, you know.
Yeah, absolutely, And we'll get into the story story. But the first movie that they used it on that we'll touch on later, was called Scent of Mystery, And you know, you get the idea. They would pipe in like you know, someone was smoking a pipe, they would pipe in the smell of tobacco smoke. Or if someone was like in a basement, they would pipe in some kind of dusty basement.
He smell mellow cadavers.
Usually it was something hopefully kind of nice, like there was a peach orchard in a scene, and they piped in peach smells and things like that. But like you said, it was not a big hit at all. Yeah, I think Time did you mention that that Time named it one of the worst fifty inventions.
Yeah, And This is along with DDT, Agent Orange and the baby cage. So that was that's really saying something.
What else recently was on that list?
Our live show? No, yeah, our live show the topic of our lives shows on the ideas of the century.
I thought you meant our live show was one of the worst inventions in the last fifteenth or the last hundred years. That was a good joke.
It was a good joke, unintentional but still pretty good.
Yes, you're right, our secret topic for the live show that you're exactly right.
Yeah, we just gave away that if you go look at that list of one hundred worse ideas of the century from time, you will stumble across our topic, but you may not know that that's it.
Yeah, and you know it's not somemellvision. No, so then you narrowed it down a bit.
Yeah, now you've got ninety nine other chances.
So a company coming up with a signature scent is a big thing these days, Like we don't want to underestimate scent as a as a sense because it's very powerful. Yeah, there are very famous signature scents of like hotels and stores and stuff like that. But as far as using odor to tie it to entertainment. They were doing this in stage plays at least in the eighteen hundreds, and I would bet before that even.
Sure, apparently they like theater owners would would basically do what they could to kind of make the whole scene that you were seeing being portrayed just that much more realistic by incorporating smell along with sites and sounds. Right, they didn't want you to touch the actors and you weren't allowed to lick the actors. So those were the
three that they were allowed to work with. Yeah, and it's it's understandable why because I mean, if you think about it, like you were saying, like scent is a very powerful sense that if you could tap into that correctly, you could really blow someone's mind with a stage production and eventually a movie. And that was the basis of this whole thing. In retrospect, it was gimmicky, it's silly,
it's mid century. Yeah, it has a name like Smell a Vision, But if you really dig down into the story, you find like this is a really earnest, genuine project that was meant to just completely transform filmmaking for the better.
Yeah, I mean said earlier, they thought it was going to be the next revolution, like adding sound, which is kind of funny, like, this isn't something that appeals to me, even though we'll get to four D later on and talk about that. But the first movie theater to try anything like this in the United States was in Forest City, Pennsylvania. It was called the Family Theater and it was owned by Roxy Rothafel.
And ironically, it was a pornography theater, right.
That was it.
It is gullible day for you.
That was the last episode, and I'm still gullible.
Can you imagine a Triple X theater called the Family Theater?
That was the joke I was thinking from Roxy, like triple X. I gotcha, and I totally missed it. I'm off my game.
Hey, it's okay man. As a matter of fact, I'll just retract that whole thing.
No, I get it. That's a great name for a theater, Chuck, the Family Theater now showing deep throat exactly all right.
So the Family Theater was owned by Roxy Rothefel, and Roxy is someone we talked about in our Rocketes episode because this person would go on to open up the Radio City Music Hall and the Rockets were originally called the roxy Ettes, but in nineteen o eight he owned the Family Theater and got a newsreel in nineteen sixteen about the Rose Bowl Parade and said, Hey, I'm going to pump the smell of rose oil into this theater
and fan it in there. And that was sort of the first little attempt at something like this.
Yeah, And I mean, I think that was kind of one of the things when they added like interior ventilation systems, Like people figured out you can not only move air around the theater pretty quickly, you can move sense around the theater. So in very short order, other theaters started trying the same thing. There was a theater in Boston in nineteen twenty nine, there was a Detroit theater in nineteen forty three, and it just kind of sporadically was
attempted at. But it wasn't until a guy named Hans Lob That's what I'm going with, who was Swiss, who was an inventor and an osmologist, which is somebody who studies the science of smells. And it wasn't until he came along with somebody said I'm making this work. I'm going to make this happen and really like dedicated himself to it.
Absolutely. He had made his name removing smells. I'm not sure what chemicals he used.
I was looking all over for it.
Well, these days a use stuff like ozone, which.
Is not good at all.
Well, I tell you, man, someone stole our car like.
Three years ago.
I remember that and basically just joy road and wrecked it for a few days and it smelled like smoked three thousand cigarettes in the span of three days. Yeah, and we got that thing back and that's all the entrance company. I was like, man, I don't care what
you do, We're not taking this car back. There's no way it's ever going to smell the same again, right, And they said, oh, we use an ozone treatment and it didn't smell like cigarette smoke, but it smelled funky after that, and we fought tooth and nail with him. I was like, you know, we can't drive around like this.
Ozone has its own smell, and it's also super reactive and you don't want to breathe it in. Luckily has a very short like lifespan, but it's you don't want to be around ozone.
Basically, No, that car is not in our family anymore. By the way, it had bad energy after that, so we didn't want any part of it.
Yeah, I am, that's pretty understandable. I can totally see that. Yeah, so, yeah, I guess he was doing ozone too. That was what I came up with with that.
Yeah, he was. He was using chemicals to remove odors, and then he said, hey, I could reverse this whole thing and add odors into movie theaters and debuted that idea at the thirty nine to forty World's Fair in New York with his partner Robert Barthis, and they had a thirty five minute fild called a film called My Dream or Mine Troum I guess it was in German, and they had thirty two different chemical odors that they pumped out during this thirty five minute film. Yeah, that's
almost a smell a minute. Yeah, And he called it scentovision, which is much nicer than smellovision for sure. I mean they're both kind of goofy.
Apparently it generally worked too. The New York Times, which would become one of the biggest critics I guess of smellovision, later on, endorsed it. This was back in the Yeah, nineteen thirty nine, nineteen forty years before it actually was attempted in a feature film, but they said that they called it a smellie instead of a talkie, and they said that, you know, some of it worked. I think bacon didn't work very well, but incense worked really well.
It was very convincing, and I guess they had the timing down and all that. But the projecttionist was actually running not just the film but also the scent emissions as well.
He was chief wafter Yeah, all right, maybe we should take a break. Oh, okay, and we'll come back talk about more smells right after this. All right, So how did you pronounce the name lob or lobby?
Lob Lob.
Had a semi successful debut at the Scent Division, but no one jumped on this, saying it was about ten years before anyone really cared to do any more exploration because of a funny thing that happened over the course of World War Two. Before the war, movies were a very big deal. After the war, movies were still a big deal, but TV had come along by that point, right, and sort of like the you know, theater owners now
being worried about people just streaming everything at home. They were worried that people are just going to watch TV now, so they wanted to up the ante in the in viewing in person experience in the theater and smell a vision was one of those first ideas.
Yeah, they did another one. I can't remember. I think the movie was called The Chiller, but the producer installed electric shocks into the movie theater seats from the patrons. I can't remember what he called it. It was like that age where they needed to do something that he just couldn't possibly do at home. And Michael Todd is he actually wasn't the guy who really was like, Okay, we're going to make this work. Michael Todd Junior was
the guy who ended up making it work. But his father, Michael Todd Sr. Who I saw this random bit of trivia a website called in seventy millimeter dot com which is about the movie biz. Yeah, and he the author said that Michael Todd Senior, he was born Evram Hirsch Goldbogan. He was Polish and he adopted his son's name. So Michael Todd Junior came before Michael Todd Senior. Isn't that interesting?
That is super interesting and very strange, But.
The outside of it is. Michael Todd was a producer. He was at first a vaudeville producer, then a Broadway producer, and he eventually became a film producer.
That's right, And he was he's best known if you've ever seen Todd AO. At the end of the film, he kind of helped pioneer the seventy millimeter format. Yeah, and and cinerama scope. It's a it's a widescreen format. It's it's probably a whole episode or short stuff on itself. But Todd AO as a company is still around, I think in some capacity. But a very sort of invent
to enterprising guy basically. And like you said, he came knocking around Hollywood eventually after his Broadway run, and they right out of the gate had a very very big hit with a movie called Around the World in Eighty Days. Yeah, and almost used this movie as the big debut for Smellvision, but decided not to feel like kind of at the last minute.
Yeah, and very wisely too, because so Michael Todd Junior and senior, this is their first film production and they won the Oscar for Best Picture for that year nineteen fifty seven. It beat out Giant with Rock Hudson, James Dean, and Liz Taylor. Michael Todd was seated next to Liz Taylor because they'd just gotten married a couple months before.
When his movie beat Hers for the Best Picture, they also beat Ten Commandments, So it was like a big deal that these essentially outsiders had just walked in, produced such a great movie and won Best Oscar. He didn't live very long after that. He died in a plane crash, I think the next year, in nineteen fifty eight. Yeah, but his son just carried on the mantle. They were like actual collaborators, so there was just no question whether
Michael Todd Junior was going to continue on. But I get the impression that Junior was more into the idea of Smell a Vision than Senior was, because it wasn't until after Senior died that Junior said I'm gonna make this happen.
That's right. So he got in touch with Loub and said, let's do this one movie. Let's give it a shot. It's gonna be called Scent of Mystery. We're gonna have all sorts of you know, something that kind of bugs me. I'm not a big three D guy. It bugs me when they do shots that you can tell, like when you see the two D version, it's like they did that thing coming at the screen clearly, just as a sort of like a three D gimmick.
Like Friday the Thirteenth Part three did that a lot.
Yeah, I mean even modern three D movies do it a lot. I feel like they'll, you know, have a couple of shots there where it's like something is flying right at the camera and you're just in two D. It's like, uh, you know they did that just for the three D.
Yeah. I have to say in that movie, they did a good job with it, like Kevin Bacon's playing with the yo yo and the shots from underneath and the yoyo is coming like right at you.
Wait, he was in the first one, wouldn't he.
He was in the third one. He's dude, he's the guy who does the I think he's the guy doing the handstand who gets like cut in half from the bottom up by Jason with a machete.
Okay, I thought he's in the first one.
I'm almost positive he's hand saying.
Guy, handstand guy.
Uh huh?
Is that his credit?
I don't know.
That'd be pretty great.
I don't know. Yeah, he could have been in the first one, two's in everything of course.
Oh well you don't. You're not in multiple ones unless you're Jason because you get packed.
Up, right Jason or Corey Feldman?
Right? Was he the one of us?
He was in like five or six I think.
Okay, I only saw a couple of those. Uh. Anyway, that's what they did with Scent of Mystery is they added all kinds of little gags in there to sort of take place to time out with the smells, which, you know, you can't blame them. If they're trying to debut this new thing, they wanted to, you know, really incorporate it, and they did in a big way.
Yeah, they like they It was the first motion picture written to have smells associated with it. As we'll see later on, there was a picture that was kind of retroactively retrofitted with smells, but this one was like, we're going to have this smell come out at this part in the script, right, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, like we said, like, Lobe was a lob. I don't even remember how we sat his name anymore. He was a consummate inventor. He
was fairly genius from what I could tell. And he had invented what he called the smell brain, which is like the center es central component of the smell of vision. Well, and we should say I think you said he'd called it centavision originally.
Yeah.
One of the stipulations of his contract with Michael Todd Jr. Was that they were going to change it to smellovision, right, big diff Yeah, And apparently Michael Todd Junior was asked like, why didn't you change it to something more dignified, and he said, I don't understand how you can be dignified about a process that introduces smells into a theater.
Yeah, I don't know what you could call it. That isn't kind of cheeky.
I think sentavision still worked. Yeah, I think it was great. But anyway, this smell brain was like the central component of the entire smell of vision process. I guess.
Yeah. And this is one of those things that you and I both I think, get kind of knocked out about mechanical solutions to things, and this was that exactly. It was a big box and had all these chemical vials with these scents in them, and that was attached to a belt that was attached to a motor, and it simply would as the movie plays, it's timed to queue up these these smells in sense and it would
basically load up into place. The belt would rotate on que and then a needle is inserted into the vial and spits it into a fan that pipes it through.
Uh.
And this was sort of the key, I think. And yes, we'll get into more of this later, but it piped it into ideally would pipe it into vince that would not just go through the air conditioning or heating system or whatever, but under each seat, like miles and miles of this tubing.
Yeah, for sure. And that was, like you said, that's the key. Apparently it worked really really well. Michael Todd Junior gave Lobe a loub that's what we've been saying, and how distracting. He gave him an entire theater in Chicago to basically set up like a proof of concept, and it worked very well. I think he started working on it in nineteen fifty seven, nineteen fifty eight. There's real there's a discrepancy between when this whole thing miradors.
We'll see either nineteen fifty nine or nineteen sixty. But before they could get it out to market in I think New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, they somebody beat them to it, right, Yeah, a guy named Walter Reader Junior.
Yeah, he had Aroma Rama. Again, pretty cheeky.
I think it's better than smell Avision. Yeah, I mean they're both.
I mean, smell Division really fit that mid century age, you.
Know, sure, so does Aroma Rama.
Yeah. I think back then they both kind of went over pretty well.
They're the kind of words with tail fins, you know what I mean.
Yeah, yeah, totally. This was in New York at the Demil Theater, and this is the one that you reference. He didn't actually make a movie from scratch to work with Aroma Rama. He bought the rights to a documentary called Behind the Great Wall. It was sort of a travel documentary about China, and he used his Aroma Rama in that way, and people did not like it. Critically. They they said it was a stunt. I think The New York Times said the smells were elusive, oppressive, or perfunctory and banal.
This is not good. The same reviewer went on to say that that that the treatment in between smells that was meant to clear the air had its own sticky, sweet smell. That quote tends to become upsetting before the film has run its full two hours. And then when the reviewer left the theater, they happily filled their lungs with that lovely fume laden New York go zone. It
has never smelled so good. So that's not really the review you're going for when you're releasing the first smell Avision or Aroma rama picture.
Well yeah, and on the bad reviews of that, they even mentioned the upcoming scentse of Mystery HU, which is definitely not what you want when you're following up someone who had had jumped the line ahead of you.
Right, they got a terrible review, like they got a terrible review by proxy.
Basically, yeah, exactly, so.
You want to take a break and come back and we'll tell everybody about just exactly what happened when Sente Mystery premiered.
Cliffhanger, let's do it.
All, right, Chuck. So we're here. It's either nineteen fifty nine, it's nineteen sixty, and it's time for the Cente Mystery to premiere, and Michael Todd Junior's been talking it up. He has a famous quote where he said that he hopes people find it sensational. Here's that kind of guy. Yeah, and the film itself was apparently fairly well received. I was directed by a guy named Jack Cardiff who is
a cinematographer. I think he was a cinematograph for black Narcissists if I'm not mistaken, and won an Oscar for it. But he said he signed on to this one because he said the script was very well written and really dramatized the smells, which is man, that's a press to her quote if I've ever heard one. Right there, I think he probably should have just said, like I needed the money. Can we all disagree on that being okay? But he directed it, and again it was a pretty
cute little film. Daniel Melliott beloved actor who was Indiana Jones' mentor and the first couple I believe remember what.
Was his name talking about Marcus.
Yes, he played He was the lead in Scent of Mystery, Oh Crazy, Yeah, and Peter Laurie was his sidekick cab driver. And the whole thing is set in Spain. It has its own travel log kind of quality to it as well.
So the first two Smelly Pictures were essentially travel logs, one in China, one in Spain, but the second one had like a kind of a mystery plots to with impostors and all that, and those with gags that you were talking about, Like they really had a lot to do with the movie, like the the twist or the way the solution to the mystery that Daniel Elliott figures
out is based on a smell. He could tell that the woman he's talking to is claiming to be someone else is an imposter because she's wearing the different perfume and the audience is smelling that kind of stuff.
Or that's kind of fun.
Yeah, another guy's rooted out as one of the evildoers because of the smell of the pipe tobacco that he's smoking. Like there's a lot, you know, some of it was gratuitous, Like they did that whole thing like you were talking about where they pull fresh bread out of the oven, right, and I saw that they just shove it into the camera and the camera just stays there for a little
while so you could get the fresh bread smell. But the they really kind of went to great lengths to make it so that the smells had some They weren't all just gratuitous. They really did have something to do with the plot.
Yeah, I think some of that plot centric stuff could be kind of fun back then. Still don't know if i'd be into it today, But again, we'll get the four D coming up. The New York Times again was not too kind, had some pretty bad things to say. Patrons sit there snipping and snuffling like a lot of bird dogs, trying hard to catch the scent. And you know,
it was just a big flop basically overall. And this is something I couldn't verify, but Hans Laub's daughter Carmen claimed that Michael Todd Junior cheaped out on the ultimate conversion into the other theaters by not taking it to each seat, which was, like we said, really, one of the keys is to make sure it's got to be timed just right, Like you can't have the scent piping in from an air duck twenty feet over your head that you smell in two minutes when scene is already
long gone. And the real key was having it under each seat. And she claims that they didn't do that, and that's one of the big reasons why it failed.
I saw kind of like indirect references that kind of support that claim that the first premiers flopped. But then they did some technical adjustments and they got it all figured out. So I'm wondering if they went in and did the tube band because they saw that they had really screwed up by trying to save a few bucks. The problem is the New York Times had already reviewed it.
It was I mean, because it was a gimmick. People like to see gimmicks fail or I should say this, if a gimmick fails, people tend to find that satisfactory. If it's successful, awesome, it becomes legendary and we'd be having a completely different episode right now. But if a gimmick fails, people love jumping on it. Henny Youngman famously had a pretty great one liner. He said that he didn't understand the movie because he had a cold. I
thought it was a great one liner. Apparently I'm alone here. Yeah, was all right, but it it just got smeared because people like smearing other people who try new things. Yeah, so it had a very very small window to be successful or not. Oh, it wasn't successful in that small window, and so that was it. It was a flop. And then that was it for Smellovision. And not only was that it for Smellovision, Chuck, that was it for Hans Lob and Michael Todd Jr. As well.
Yeah, they canceled. They were going to expand to one hundred theaters. They canceled that order. Carmen Helnslob's daughter said that, you know, he basically died penniless. For worse than penniless, he died with debts. Even he did invent something that again didn't bring him riches, but sort of the beta version of what you would call a glade plug in or something today. Yeah, that was called best Air. But that didn't work, even though it was pretty ahead of its time.
Yeah, and then Michael Todd Junior went off. He didn't produce anything else. Apparently there were two other scripts that he trademarked. One was called Bumpkins Holiday, and the description I saw was that it's it was just a man riding a bus and that there was no dialogue of any kind. Wow, Like, what would that have been?
Like?
I would love to see somebody make that movie, because how would you even attempt to make that interesting? You know?
And maybe he was just like with that title, I got to snap this thing up.
Right, so that never got made. The other one was called Creature from the Bronx. That never got made either, so he never produced another movie again. I don't know if he died broke pennyless and with debts. I think kid some incomes still from right, I'm saying like Hans Low, But I'm saying I don't think Michael Todd Junior did oh and his career petered out, I think, is how I saw it described.
Yeah, No, that's sad. A couple of films have gone on to do something like this later on. John Waders was very famous for his nineteen eighty one film Polyester in Theaters coming with a little scratch and sniff card that you would use, very very funny and kitchy. Obviously John Waters is going to do something fun like that.
But what sense were they well.
I mean, I think Fart was a very famous dirty shoes skunk. It wasn't you know, Peaches and Lilac right exactly. And then the Rugrats Go Wild movie, as in homage is what they called it, did the same thing in two thousand and three with their film, And then there have been more modern stabs at this in the way of four D.
Yeah, Dave, I think we said at the outset helped us out with us and he mentions the first four D movie theater ever created was called the Censorium. It was located at six Flags power Plant Amusement Park in Baltimore, which I think now is like called power Plant Live or something like that.
That sounds about right.
It was like Buckhead in the nineties, jammed into like one call building from what I can tell. But back in nineteen eighty four they opened the Censorium and Dave said he went there and like the seats moved and rumboled, and they hit him with popcorn smells and stuff like that sprayed with water to simulate rain, I believe, And it, just like with smell Avision with Hans Loeb and his attempt at the World's Fair, is basically proof of concept
of the World's Fair. Nobody did much with it after that. Six Flights closed in nineteen ninety until twenty years later when South Korean company came up with the forty X and that's still around today.
Yeah, I mean that's the next wave. I have not tried it out yet, Like you said. At premiered in two thousand and nine in South Korea. There are twenty one effects, so it's not just it's like kind of what Dave experience. It's got Your seats are moving and rubbling and rocking back and forth. Seatbacks can like punch you. They'll be fog or cold or hot air, and plenty of smells. And there are close to eight hundred of these theaters opening. I'm sorry operating in the world today.
I have not gone. I want to try it out. I don't think. I just want to see what it's like. I can assure you I probably won't like it, right, But I will say that this podcast that I guess is on is really great. I've mentioned it here before, called Too Scary, Didn't watch. It's these three girlfriends who one of them loves horror movies, the other two hate them, but they want to know what happens. So she watches in them and recaps them and it's a really fun show.
And Sammy Smart is one of the co hosts, who is a great name. Yeah, Sammy's great, and she watches these movies. The horror movie She's one of the watches him and she went to four d X for the Top Gun movie, and she said she had a blast it. Really yeah, Samy, someone who like who's judgment and opinion I value. So just based on that alone, I'll give it a shot. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try out forty X.
So that my source, which is a Quartz article called I watched Batman versus Superman at a forty theater so you don't have to by Adam Epstein, all right, it's basically the opposite. He was saying that, like there's a part where some character gets shot in the back and his seat punched him in the back for some reason. He said his hair was just kind of wet for some reason. All the well, I'm just saying, like like getting punched, Like why would you want to simulate that? You know?
Oh well, I think that's the whole deal.
His his point was this, this is the upshot, as as he would have probably said it to you or me. It did the opposite of pulling him into the movie. They were reminded of exactly of where he was at every single moment and now interested him from getting into the movie itself. Okay, yeah, he yeah, he didn't really like it at all, And from what I've seen, basically every review is similar to that, except for apparently Sammy's Smart's review.
Well, I think Sammy, I don't think shit was a full throated endorsement. I think it was like she'd said, I had a really good time at this movie and this experience I gotcha cool, which is different sometimes than saying like this is awesome in the next way you.
Know, right, I'm with you, But it's hanging on hanging in there.
It is. And there's a you can get this in your home now. There's a company from Spain called Ola Rama that will sell you. It's a sort of a two foot but it looks like about one foot box kind of looks like a box fan, right, and you can load up to twenty smells I think for the basic fifty five hundred dollars package, and it does the
same thing. It syncs up with your movies through software, and I think you can go all the way up to like twenty grand if you want a forty smell version, and you can put it in your home theater.
Yeah, it reminds me of the I Smell peripheral. Remember we talked about the old Apple peripheral that never took off.
That's what it was, plugged into your computer and did the same thing.
Yeah, I've got about that. I have one more things. You'll allow me, oh please. So they went back and they kind of I don't think they'd made any edits whatsoever. They just retitled the send of Mystery into Holiday in Spain, it's not called sent a Mystery anymore. And they took
away the smelly parts. But because they'd written the script around smells I saw A Daily Telegraph reviewer said it took on a baffling, almost surreal quality in some parts, like where the bread is pulled out of the oven and then just kept in the middle of the screen for all interesting.
It became like an art film.
Yeah, yeah, it just it didn't make sense anymore. I thought that was a great description of it. I want to see it now.
Maybe I should watch it.
Yeah, you got anything else?
Maybe we should watch it together and we should just provide each other with surprising smells.
Oh that's a great idea, you know. Yeah, that's a fantastic ed let's give it.
Ah, it don't sync up, you know, like the bread comes out of the oven and that's when I do like motor oil or something.
He just tells me with old used motor oil. Yeah, I'm like, that smells terrible. It would be fun, let's see. Yeah, I think we are already asked you if you got anything else.
Right, I got nothing?
Okay, So since Chuck said he's got nothing, that means time for a listener mail.
I'm gonna call this one just a very nice thank you. Hey, guys, been listening to the show for about ten years now. I want to express my gratitude. I've always enjoyed your down to earth, humorous, clever, and intentional approach to the podcast. I love learning about the stories, events and concepts I've never heard of. We're hearing a more detail look at it.
I never would have thought to explot further. I realize that your podcast has been with me through several milestones and difficult life events, grad schools, starting my career, grief, and now through my first year sobriety.
Wow.
I work as a music therapist in a pretty high strung environment, so I always appreciate how the show helps me to take my mind off things. I quite literally can't fall asleep without listening to a stuff you Should Know episode old or new. And that's not because it's boring, Guys. I often use listening the car and on walks as well, but something about the show helps to bring a sense of openness and appreciation for life that helps calm my mind. So thank you to Josh and Chuck in the SYSK crew.
And that is from Emily.
Thanks Emily. Yes, we take that as high praise that we help people fall asleep. I agree. If you want to get in touch with us and let us know how we've helped you, or how long we've accompanied you on your life's journey, or just to say hi or whatever, you can send us an email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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