Boston – Megan Dickerson always loved the rich colors and melodic score of the film “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.” But she also longed to experience the sweet scents of chocolate and schnozberries.
A self-proclaimed multisensory artist, Dickerson is trying to revive “Smellovision.” She has staged outdoor showings of “Willy Wonka” for hundreds of people and used oscillating fans and artificially scented oils to distribute aromas of blueberry pie and banana taffy during the film.
With help from local art houses and the Boston Children’s Museum, she plans to bring other films for sniffing to theaters this fall.
“There’s been a crazy response to the movement,” Dickerson said. “I guess there just aren’t enough opportunities for wonder out there, but there’s something nostalgic about this art action that makes you feel like a kid again.”
Smellovision never quite caught on, though it dates to the late 1950s, when a signal from a “smell track” on the film activated a tubing system to transmit odors to each seat.
Aroma-Rama, a similar application, piped odors into the theater through the ventilator system. In the 1980s, Odorama made a stale debut with scratch- and-sniff cards, which also briefly made their way into living rooms.
Dickerson, a manager of community programs for the Boston Children’s Museum, said she has always been fascinated with the psychology associated with smell and was especially struck by the idea of “scent memories.”
“This will inevitably give us a sense of comfort and draw us back to a playful place, and give us flashbacks of things we may have forgotten about,” she said, noting that a strawberry-lemon bottled scent in her collection triggers memories of her older brother’s hair gel.
Besides the sweet smells of fruit and cotton candy, Dickerson’s bottled scents ordered through the Fragrance Foundation include dirt, condensed milk, fizzy lemonade, grass and sushi.
