Mini-Stories: Volume 20

Happy New Year! We're starting 2025 with four more mini stories about a sleepy button, electric signs, a very important sticker, and video you can smell.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

  Some of the most important design choices are the ones that go unnoticed. The details that together make an experience feel intuitive, comfortable, and above all, exhilarating. At Acura, that means looking closely at how every detail can make your experience behind the wheel more rewarding. Every lesson learned and every idea refined becomes part of what comes next, and it lives inside every MDX, ADX, and Integra. That's precision crafted performance. That's Acura.

• 0:34Roman Mars?

  If you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Indeed sponsored jobs gets you quality candidates when you need them most. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job, the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now, then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

• 1:12Roman Mars?

  Happy New Year, beautiful nerds. It is now the impossibly futuristic sounding 2025, and we are ringing in the new year with our 20th edition of Mini Stories, featuring tales about Cold War neon signs, Japanese fire escapes, the marvels of Smello Vision. But first, we must wake up from our holiday slumber. Brace yourselves.

• 1:40Roman Mars?

  I live in a house with seven other people. I'm gonna let that sink in for a second. That is a lot of humans under one roof with a lot of different schedules, which means a lot of alarms going off anywhere from 6:00 AM to, I don't know, 10:00 AM. There's the one that's like,

• 2:00Roman Mars?

  but it goes for like an hour because it doesn't actually wake anyone up. And then the one that really, really gets me is the duck.

• 2:09Roman Mars?

  Now, everyone has their own way of waking up. Personally, I don't really need an alarm because the fear, dread, and obligation of middle age keeps my consciousness right at the edge of alert at all times. But in my house, this morning chorus of quacks and bird songs exist because almost everyone sets their alarms early, often much earlier than they actually need to get up. And that's because they are building in time to abuse the worst feature of their alarm, a feature so cursed and diabolical, it defeats the very purpose of any alarm. I'm talking, of course, about the snooze button.

• 2:48Roman Mars?

  The snooze button is a bad solution to a conundrum that's existed for millennia. People need to sleep, but they also have things to do. In ancient Greece, Plato jolted himself out of bed with a system where a set amount of water slowly dripped into an airtight pot until the pressure was so high, it would let out a piercing sound, kinda like a teapot. And during the Industrial Revolution, some towns had gigantic whistles which summoned workers to the factory. Around the same time, a whole job existed for people who would go around knocking on doors and windows to wake people up. But once the alarm clock entered the household with sounds like this

• 3:28Roman Mars?

  and this,

• 3:33Roman Mars?

  a backlash was inevitable. It was only a matter of time.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  You can sleep soundly depending upon the snooze alarm clock, the GE Telecron. It wakes you each morning and then lets you snooze. Continues to wake you just as you choose.

• 3:55Roman Mars?

  In 1956, GE invented the world's first alarm clock with a snooze button. On top of the clock, there was a big old fat bar labeled snooze. That's S-N-O-O-Z. And it could not be missed. One smack of the clock, and presto, you just bought yourself a little more sleep.

• 4:30Roman Mars?

  The first snooze alarm clocks were built to let you snooze for 10 to 15 minutes. But mass production required some standardization. In the 1950s, a double-digit snooze was too complicated to program into the gears of a clock at scale. So GE got as close as they could with nine minutes. A nine-minute snooze was the choice. After millennia of trying to get ourselves out of bed at a certain time, the snooze alarm dared to ask, "Do you really have to get up right now?" And across the country, people more or less said, "No, I don't."

• 5:05Roman Mars?

  The clock was a major hit. And as technology improved, a few competitors ended up offering alternatives to the nine-minute snooze, like the West Clock's Drowse alarm clock.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Let's see now. Do I want five minutes more sleep, or 10? Five.

• 5:24Roman Mars?

  The West Clock's alarm clock gave people the option of snoozing two different amounts of time, depending on if you hit the Drowse button on the left side or the right side.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Gee, I could use 10 minutes this time.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Man, you just can't oversleep with this new West Clock.

• 5:40Roman Mars?

  But the Drowse button didn't have that sweet, sweet simplicity. Nobody wants to wake up and think about how much longer they want to sleep. People just want to sleep more. And the snooze button gave us that.

• 5:55Roman Mars?

  Or at least, that's what we thought. Despite the fact that many of our phones are still factory preset to snooze for nine minutes, today, we all know deep down that the snooze button doesn't really give us meaningful sleep. And it also doesn't let us rise. Instead, it catches us at our weakest moment, when we are least capable of making decisions, when it's far easier to slap a button than to put two feet on the ground. In the end, the key to waking up might just rest in not giving yourself any other options. And the key to more sleep? Well, let me know when someone figures that out.

• 6:45Roman Mars?

  I'm here with 99PI editor Kelly Prime for a rare appearance on mic. So Kelly, what do you have for me today?

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Hi, Roman. So I want you to imagine this very classic Americana neon scene.

• 6:57Roman Mars?

  Okay.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  So like, if you imagine pictures of Broadway or vintage Las Vegas, like, the street just lit up with signs sort of competing for your attention. Can you picture that?

• 7:09Roman Mars?

  Absolutely, I can picture that.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Okay, great, because that's not what I'm talking about.

• 7:13Roman Mars?

  Okay, well, I'll erase that from my mind, okay?

• 7:17Speaker 03

  That's the neon that you and I are probably more familiar with. But I want to tell you a story about a different neon aesthetic. It's one that was created in the Eastern Bloc, right in the middle of the Cold War.

• 7:29Roman Mars?

  Okay.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  And they basically took that flashy, commercial Americana style of neon, and they twisted it to make this new socialist style that's completely unique to this specific place at this specific moment of history.

• 7:46Roman Mars?

  Okay, tell me more about it.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  So the story starts in the mid 50s, about a decade into communism in the Eastern Bloc. At this point, people were starting to push back, to rebel. And so Soviet leaders got together, and they were like, "We have to work out a plan to quell some of this political unrest." And their plan was basically neon. It was called Neonization, was the state-sponsored program.

• 8:15Roman Mars?

  Okay, I'm in. Tell me more.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  Okay, Neonization was a government program meant to push the idea of a brighter future.

• 8:27Roman Mars?

  Since this is your first time recording with me, I will allow you that one once. But another one of those, and I'm pulling the plug.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  We'll see. The concept was like, okay, things are bleak, we get that. But shh, don't even worry about it. Shh, look at these lights.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  So what they decided to do was change the landscape, turn things around, brighten up everything.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  That's David Hill. He's the director of the Neon Museum in Warsaw, which is dedicated to documenting and preserving Cold War era neon signs.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  The proponents certainly argued, this will placate the public, this will bamboozle them, this will make people happy again.

• 9:06Roman Mars?

  So rather than provide things, you know, substantive things in their lives to actually make people happy, they just decided to put lights in front of them.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. Great use of resources.

• 9:17Roman Mars?

  Okay. Okay. And so why neon specifically? Why not murals or, you know, I don't know, anything else?

• 9:24Speaker 03

  So the thing is that Eastern Europe actually had a history with neon. And this was especially true of Warsaw. So before World War II, Warsaw had been just like another modern European capital with everything that entailed, including bright shiny lights.

• 9:43Speaker 04

  It was a shimmering pearl. It was very famous for its neon signs from 1926 onwards. So it had this connection to neon.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  But the war just basically destroyed all of them. As you can imagine, these very delicate glass tubes would not fare well in all the bombings that happened. But even though they were gone, people in Warsaw still had a really positive association with them. It really represented modernity and just generally prosperity, like before things were destroyed. So the socialist government knew that and they figured they could sort of leverage that association to foster goodwill towards the current regime.

• 10:22Roman Mars?

  So the communist government came up with this plan to neonize the city to make everyone happy. So what's step one in this process? Like, how do they start?

• 10:31Speaker 03

  So one of the first things the government did was to hire some of the best artists in the nation. And like, some of these people actually were already talented neon artists and electricians, but many of them weren't. Like, these were groundbreaking visual artists who were used to working on paper and canvas. They didn't necessarily have any pre-existing experience working with neon. So the only thing that was really limiting their imagination was the bounds of the material.

• 11:02Speaker 04

  They would just have a piece of cardboard and just draw lines all over it. And then later realize, well, that's not really possible. We can't make that. It's too zigzaggy or, you know, whatever the restrictions were.

• 11:13Roman Mars?

  Okay, so given that, given that their imagination is sort of wild and is unfettered by the constraints of neon, but there are actual physical constraints of building something in neon. What exactly did the artist end up making?

• 11:25Speaker 03

  I'm so glad you asked because I've been very into these since I discovered them. And I think the best way to go about it is just to show you some examples. So the first one I'm about to ask you to look at was made to decorate a flower shop. So just describe what you're seeing here.

• 11:44Roman Mars?

  So I'm seeing very bright neon and it's a green kind of vine, lots of flowers of a couple of different colors. And the flower petals, like they're not uniform. They're like, they're kind of, they're kind of scribbly.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  Exactly. They're like scribbly. It looks like a sketch pad, like someone has been doodling, but on an entire building with neon.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  This was designed by a graphic artist, Zofia Kosteska, now Koshupskaya. So she created this as a young graphic designer for a pavilion that sold basically carnations and roses. Nothing fancy there, except the building was covered in butterflies and flowers and grass. It was enormous. It went on for meters. We're talking 20, 30 meters.

• 12:27Roman Mars?

  Okay, so these are big.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  They're huge. These are huge.

• 12:31Roman Mars?

  Okay.

• 12:31Speaker 03

  So they're not like a Budweiser sign hanging in the window of a bar. They are not that.

• 12:36Roman Mars?

  20, 30 meters, that's a hundred feet of squiggly flowers. That's amazing.

• 12:41Speaker 03

  It's crazy. Yeah. So the next one I want to show you is actually, the scale is not the same, but it is one of my favorites. It's a pink mermaid and she's holding up a sword and shield, which is like the mermaid with the sword and shield is the symbol of the city of Warsaw. And she's hovering over an open book.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  Wherever you saw this beautiful pink mermaid sitting on an open book, she would denote your public library, so Biblioteka Pubbliczna. Wonderful. So you'd see this symbol all over the place in Warsaw.

• 13:12Roman Mars?

  That's so cool. This thing is beautiful. It's hard to imagine neon over municipal buildings.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 13:19Roman Mars?

  I was in...

• 13:22Roman Mars?

  I was in Sagertees, New York, like literally yesterday. And there was a pink neon framing of this old industrial bridge. And I was just mesmerized by that thing. And just like that sort of juxtaposition of neon and, you know, just like kind of pretty mundane municipal design and decay was lovely. It was a revelation to me. I loved it.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I want more of that. And that was like very much the thing here, like very much the thing. So by the late 60s, Warsaw had hundreds of thousands of these signs across the city.

• 14:00Roman Mars?

  Wow.

• 14:02Speaker 03

  But what's really striking to me is the fact that all of these neon signs had this cohesiveness to them. You know, if you cast your mind to that, again, American scene of a street covered in neon, what you're gonna see is a big sort of mishmash of color. But in Poland, that was not at all the case.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  We're looking at something as a very well thought out coherent project. And I think that delivered a slightly different aesthetic, a different feeling, as if, my God, the city is a city of neon. It's a city of light and it all seems to work together. It all seems to be harmonious.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  And a big reason for that is the fact that this neonization process was run by the state. There was actually a central body that commissioned and signed off on every single sign.

• 14:52Roman Mars?

  You'd think they'd have better things to do.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I guess not.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  And all these signs were specifically designed to complement each other. So no one piece was approved unless it fit into the style of the whole.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  You can see how seriously the authorities took this in that eventually the chief city architect's title was abolished and it became the chief city graphic designer. So there was less importance on architecture and more placed on neonization and the urban aesthetic, the design.

• 15:26Roman Mars?

  So after all this neonization, Warsaw is covered in neon. But did their ultimate goal actually bear fruit? I mean, were people actually, you know, happier? Did they convince the people of Poland that everything was okay?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, it's hard to say how people in Poland felt about neonization in general. Certainly, the signs were really beautiful and it's easy to appreciate their beauty. But it's also safe to say that this tricked exactly no one into thinking that, you know, life under communism was really great.

• 15:58Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  By the early 80s, things had in fact gotten so bad that the socialist government instituted martial law. And that really took a toll on Warsaw's neons.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  These neon signs were switched off. The authorities said, well, you don't need them. You know, you're under, you're under house arrest. Why would you want to go out in the evening? So, so they were basically switched off and they were really the first rather obvious victims of this new political revolution that brought in democracy.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  And what happened next, you probably know. Communism in the Eastern Bloc didn't last. In 1989, Poland's communist state was officially replaced by a new democratic government. And when that happened, that was really the end for Warsaw's neons.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  The new democratic Polish government looked at the symbols from this, this period of occupation, as they saw it, and neon was the obvious target. And so they set about destroying as many neon signs as they could in what they called the Great Recycling Scheme, rather quaintly. And we lost so many, so many neons.

• 17:06Roman Mars?

  Wow, the Great Recycling Scheme is quite a euphemism.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, people were paid to go out into the city, find the neon signs and destroy them.

• 17:16Roman Mars?

  So are any of the original signs left up? I mean, those pictures you showed me, are those contemporary? Or were all the signs destroyed?

• 17:23Speaker 03

  So those pictures I showed you are contemporary. Those are photos of some of the few signs that did manage to survive all this time. But most of Warsaw's neons were either broken or taken down. And eventually, the remnants of neonization just kind of faded into the backdrop of the city, rather than being what they once were, which is, you know, a focal point of it. But I will say that in the last 20 or so years, there has been renewed interest among the residents of Warsaw in those signs and their history.

• 18:00Speaker 04

  I do have some, you know, some really good news, and that is that Warsaw is undergoing a bit of a renaissance. Neonization has returned.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Today, people come from around the world to see what's left of Warsaw's neons. And David says that there are now new neon signs all over Warsaw, and some of them are directly referencing the work of Poland's great neon artists.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  You see these fantastic places that young people hang out. And you look and you think, I've seen that before. That's, that's, that's a neon design by Jan Mohaski, you know, this famous neon-izer and Polish poster artist. And there it is on the streets of Warsaw, reinvented for the modern age, reinvented for the young people.

• 18:46Roman Mars?

  Well, thank you, Kelly.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Thanks, Roman.

• 18:48Roman Mars?

  And if you'd like to see some examples of these Polish neon signs, we'll have some pictures on the website.

• 18:57Roman Mars?

  Coming up, our digital director Kurt Kohlstedt figures out how to escape from a burning building in Japan. News you can use. And our pal Gillian Jacobs talks to us about movies you can smell. That's after the break.

• 19:14Roman Mars?

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• 19:59Roman Mars?

  The Sonos is on almost 24 hours a day when I'm not recording. Love the sound, feel the system. Visit sonos.com to build your system.

• 20:12Roman Mars?

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• 20:54Roman Mars?

  All of them are still in heavy use in my house, and all of them have held up great. Article is offering our listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com/99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com/99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year. The first school drop-off, the first sweater-weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions. Crunching leaves in Maine-made bean boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat.

• 21:38Roman Mars?

  So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean, be an outsider. Everyone talks about how challenging it is to raise kids, but what about protecting them? Outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, baby gates, where do you even start? Well, protecting your home and auto is a great place to start. Progressive offers customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. They're basically the baby gates of insurance. Get a quote at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.

• 22:21Roman Mars?

  We are back with Digital Director Kurt Kohlstedt. Kurt, what do you have for us?

• 22:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I wanted to tell you about this small design element that I first encountered in Tokyo. I was walking around and I started to notice these red stickers that were shaped like perfect equilateral triangles and stuck to the windows of a bunch of different buildings. Here's a picture to show you what I'm talking about.

• 22:45Roman Mars?

  Okay, so let's see. Yes, it's a red triangle, the tip pointing down, and it's centered right in the middle of every window that I see. Like, it doesn't seem accidental or put on by the people haphazardly on the inside.

• 23:00Speaker 05

  Right, there's a certain consistency to it. There's like one upside down red triangle every couple of windows. And then, you know, once I noticed them, I started to see these stickers everywhere, not just in Tokyo, but then later in Osaka and Kobe and Kyoto.

• 23:16Roman Mars?

  You know, now that I've seen these pictures, I have to admit, I didn't see these when I was in Japan. So what's up with all these stickers?

• 23:23Speaker 05

  So they're called fire department access stickers. And you shouldn't feel too bad about missing them. It really helped that I had one smack dab in the middle of my first hotel room window in Tokyo. So I did some research and I found out that in an emergency, the red triangles indicate to firefighters where to lean their ladders. And then on the inside, they have explanatory text that tells people in the building where they should go and expect to find rescue.

• 24:00Roman Mars?

  Do the triangles indicate that the windows are somehow different or that they're just the gathering point of rescue or meeting rescuee?

• 24:09Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, so I looked into that. And some of what I read indicated that these windows could be opened more easily, like either by firefighters from the outside or people from the inside. And one account indicated that they might be built out of more breakable glass too, so that like you can shatter them in an emergency. And then I noticed under my window in my hotel room that there was this metal stick, which clearly wasn't there to open the window. And I got to wondering like, is that so that I can smash the window? And I confess, I did not test the theory. And so I cannot confirm if that's why the stick was there.

• 24:46Roman Mars?

  Well, regardless of whether these arrows are indicators of any structural or physical difference about these windows, this is a place where you can go to get out of the building in an emergency.

• 24:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. It's a meeting point.

• 24:59Roman Mars?

  I guess I'm just kind of surprised that I missed these stickers. Like, are they only on certain kinds of buildings? Or are they just all kind of high up?

• 25:06Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, you're on the right track there. Height is the key determinant, because if you think about it, like smaller buildings, including houses that only have a story or two, obviously wouldn't need these at all. And on taller buildings, they'd only be needed within a certain height range, because of course, if a window is too high to be reached by a firefighter ladder, it would be dark to encourage people to congregate there, frankly.

• 25:31Roman Mars?

  I see. There's only a narrow band where these are functional. They have to be high enough that you wouldn't just get out by yourself on the first floor or second floor, but low enough that it'd be possible for a firefighter's ladder to reach you.

• 25:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And from the regulation accounts that I was reading, of course, in translation and secondary sources, it appears that it's about 100 feet where these things cap out.

• 25:56Roman Mars?

  Okay, so that's the reason why I missed them, because it's within 20 feet to 100 feet.

• 26:00Speaker 05

  Totally. And they're really, I mean, quite small, so unless you're looking for them, they're easy to miss too, right? And, you know, this actually all kind of led me back to this little journey of discovery that I took when we first met, which was over a decade ago now, if you can believe it.

• 26:20Roman Mars?

  I mean, I can believe it. It has been, it's been a while. I can't imagine, I can't imagine the show before you. So it's, it's one of those things. So what, what did it remind you of, though?

• 26:30Speaker 05

  Um, well, we had this lunch together in Oakland and we were walking around and you pointed out this little black box next to a building entrance and then another and another and so on. And they all had these little red reflective stripes.

• 26:46Roman Mars?

  And those are, of course, Knox boxes, which you've talked about a couple of times. And if you didn't, if you don't remember those episodes or didn't read the book that Kurt and I co-authored, those contain a set of keys for the building and then all those Knox boxes are held by firefighters. So if there is a crisis, they can open up this box, therefore have all the keys to the building and then get in and out more easily.

• 27:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. And so you were there for me 10 years ago, drawing my attention to something and then filling in the backstory. So this is me returning the favor.

• 27:19Roman Mars?

  Well, that was fun, Kurt. Thank you so much.

• 27:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank you, Roman.

• 27:28Roman Mars?

  Up next is actor and frequent 99PI contributor Gillian Jacobs. Hey, Gillian, welcome back.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  Thanks so much for having me, Roman.

• 27:34Roman Mars?

  It's great to have you back. So what do you have for us today?

• 27:37Speaker 03

  Well, I wanted to talk about a very particular and peculiar movie. Roman, have you ever seen the film Scent of Mystery?

• 27:45Roman Mars?

  No, but I like the way you say scent of mystery.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  I feel like it can only be said like that.

• 27:51Roman Mars?

  So tell me more about Scent of Mystery.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Well, no judgment for never having heard of it because it's a very obscure movie from 1960. But as you may be able to deduce, it is a mystery film about a mysterious woman in danger. It has Peter Laurie, wine barrels, Spain, bad Spanish.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Senor, por favor, young lady, in a big hat, mucho sombrero, donde.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  The reason I want to talk to you about it today is because my friend Joan saw it when it first came out in theaters and is still talking about it because of something unique about Scent of Mystery.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  So what do you remember about that day and about the movie? Okay, so much about the movie. I think we got popcorn because, you know, this was a big event for us to go downtown.

• 28:45Speaker 06

  So back in 1960, when Scent of Mystery first premiered, Joan was a kid living in Chicago. And it turns out she and her siblings were part of a very small group of moviegoers who got to see it exhibited in its full intended experience, which was demonstrated by this one scene in particular.

• 29:04Speaker 07

  So all of a sudden, as I'm sitting there, this, the main character, some chase thing is going on and the main character all of a sudden goes into a flower market. And this gush of, of sweet smell comes in our face and neither of us can breathe. And of course I had to rush over and get away from the smell.

• 29:31Roman Mars?

  A gush of sweet smell. I'm not sure what word in that phrase I find the most objectionable. What, what kind of smell are we talking about here?

• 29:40Speaker 06

  So as it turns out, what Joan was experiencing in that movie theater was smell-a-vision. Roman, what do you know about smell-a-vision?

• 29:52Roman Mars?

  I mean, not much other than the name. I'm sure it has something to do with the technology that allows you to smell a movie as you're watching it. But I didn't think there was much more to it than that.

• 30:04Speaker 06

  Oh, Roman, buckle up. It was the brainchild of American film producer Mike Todd Jr. And Mike Todd Jr. Was the son of, you guessed it, Mike Todd Sr., who was a hugely successful theatrical impresario and husband of Elizabeth Taylor.

• 30:24Roman Mars?

  Oh, okay. Wow.

• 30:26Speaker 06

  So Mike Todd Sr. Was this big ideas guy who loved gimmicks and doing things on a grand scale, like his hit Oscar winning film Around the World in 80 Days. It was chock full of cameos and stars and as you could guess, shot around the world. But then Mike Todd Sr. Tragically died in a plane crash in 1958, leaving his son, Mike Jr. To run his production company when he was only 28 years old. And Mike Todd Jr. Wanted to continue his father's legacy of spectacle. And in this moment of uncertainty, he remembered this technology that his father was intrigued by and had actually considered implementing in Around the World in 80 Days. This thing called smell brain.

• 31:14Roman Mars?

  That needs some work.

• 31:17Speaker 06

  I know. So, Smell Brain was this device invented by an Austrian osmologist named Hans Lob. And it was essentially a conveyor belt full of vials containing smell cues. And when prompted, the Smell Brain would pump the scent cue to each seat in the theater individually using a series of tubes.

• 31:35Roman Mars?

  So it was like this synced smell experience, matching what was on the screen?

• 31:40Speaker 06

  Exactly. Mike Todd Jr. remembered the Smell Brain and Lob and thought, okay, I'm going to invest all of my money and the resources from my dad's production company, because what moviegoers really want is to smell the movies. And this is with no market testing to support it, just the firm belief people would be so excited by the idea of sniffing stuff while watching a movie that they would rush to theaters.

• 32:06Roman Mars?

  Well, history is made by dreamers, so go for it.

• 32:10Speaker 06

  Absolutely. So, Mike Todd, he's a marketing guy. So, he decides to rebrand Smell Brain with a more attention-grabbing name, Smell-O-Vision. And he decided the way to debut this Smell-O-Vision technology was to produce and self-finance the first and only film made with the smell cues in mind during production, Scent of Mystery.

• 32:34Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. The title is extremely on the nose. Oh, sorry. I actually didn't mean that.

• 32:42Roman Mars?

  Okay, okay. So, so what was different about the film Scent of Mystery from other films? Like, like, how did it showcase the Smell-O-Vision technology?

• 32:51Speaker 06

  Oh, so deploying scents in the movie-watching experience actually goes as far back as the silent era. So, maybe a theater would show a film that had a scene at the Rose Bowl. And the theater owner would put a cotton ball soaked with rose oil in front of a fan to enhance that experience for the audience.

• 33:08Roman Mars?

  So, some audiences got to experience the smell of movies before they even heard them?

• 33:13Speaker 06

  Yes. But in those pre-Smell-O-Vision experiences, the smell cues were created... by the theater owners and not necessarily how the filmmaker intended the movie to be experienced smell of vision and scent of mystery were going to be different because it was the first time the sense were going to be intentionally embedded into the production of the film and the smells would be critical to the plot.

• 33:35Roman Mars?

  So how does a smell driven plot even work?

• 33:37Speaker 06

  Okay, so like I mentioned before, there is a mysterious woman character and everyone's trying to figure out who this mysterious woman is and every time you see this mysterious woman, you would smell her perfume. So the smell of the perfume was pumped into the audience and then that smell is key to figuring out her identity.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  And you thought there might have been one other. Un autre, she by perfume, sent of mystery, magnifico.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Irresistible, si.

• 34:10Speaker 06

  In that scene that you just heard, you would actually smell the perfume that you saw on screen, but dear listeners, you're just gonna have to use your imagination. Sorry. So Mike Todd Jr. Was so convinced that smell of vision was going to revolutionize cinema that he marketed it as a seismic advancement. Ads for the movie read, first, they moved, then they talked, now they smell. Anyway, to really try and get butts in the seats, Mike Todd Jr. Convinced his stepmother, Elizabeth Taylor, to appear as the aforementioned mysterious woman and Eddie Fisher, who was Elizabeth Taylor's then husband, even contributed the title track to the film, which actually did really well.

• 35:00Speaker 06

  A strange excitement in the air, her fragrant perfume lingers there.

• 35:19Roman Mars?

  So I'm guessing, since you mentioned that The Scent of Mystery was the first and only Smell-O-Vision film, the technology behind Smell-O-Vision was not a raging success.

• 35:29Speaker 06

  No, not at all. Sadly, no. According to audiences at the time, including my friend Joan, the technologies didn't really work all that great.

• 35:37Speaker 07

  I think I spent the entire time going, I don't smell anything. I don't smell. Do I smell anything? I don't smell anything. And we thought the whole thing was kind of a bust.

• 35:46Speaker 06

  Some of the smells were too strong. Sometimes the smells came late. Sometimes you couldn't smell anything at all. And it cost a ton of money to install. So there were only three theaters in the United States running it in full Smell-O-Vision. So the film flopped and lost a ton of money. They later tried to recoup some of their losses by re-releasing the film under the title Holiday in Spain sans Smell-O-Vision. I tried to watch it for journalism, but it was not good. The film Scent of Mystery and the name Smell-O-Vision became a joke in Hollywood. Just another goofy gimmick that didn't work.

• 36:23Roman Mars?

  In hindsight, that seems inevitable, but I imagine in the moment, that still felt sad to, you know, everyone likes innovation, move things forward.

• 36:32Speaker 06

  Absolutely. And to that point, you know, even though Smell-O-Vision died, the idea of it lived on in different forms. In 1981, John Waters directed a film called Polyester. For that, he produced Scratch and Sniff Odorama cards. And you would get a cue on screen when to, you know, scratch your smell cue, which allowed you to do the Smell-O-Vision in a more low-tech way. Spy Kids 4, Father of Children. Roman, have you watched Spy Kids 4?

• 37:04Roman Mars?

  I don't know about four, but I've certainly seen a couple of them.

• 37:07Speaker 06

  Okay, well, you missed out because Spy Kids 4. Did their own scratch and sniff cards called Aromoscope. And recently, companies like iSmell and Ophone have tried to introduce smells into computing, mobile phones. And the latest and greatest is smells for video games. And it seems like people will never let go of the dream of smelling their media content.

• 37:34Roman Mars?

  You know, I've been through different iterations of this where like, you know, 3D has come and gone in different waves. And I just feel like mostly, it's like, we've come to the idealized form, big screen, you know, a bunch of people in a dark movie theater looking at it. Like, to me, that doesn't really need to be improved very much. But are you craving more, Gillian?

• 37:56Speaker 06

  I'm not craving smells. I'll say that.

• 38:03Roman Mars?

  Fair enough. Thank you so much.

• 38:05Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 38:10Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was produced this week by Jason DeLeone, Kelly Prime, Kurt Kohlstedt, Gillian Jacobs, and Vivian Le. Edited by Christopher Johnson and Nina Potuck. Mix by Martin Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real and George Langford. Kathy Chu is our executive producer. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriela Gladney, LaShma Dawn, Jacob Medina Gleason, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. You can now find us on the social media site. Blue Sky is definitely the one to join.

• 38:53Roman Mars?

  We are having some fun there. You can also connect with 5,000 other 99PI fans on our Discord server, where we talk about the power broker, architecture, all kinds of fun stuff. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

• 39:17Speaker 06

  She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard. But then we found out she had agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult. So we asked her doctor for more help.

• 39:32Speaker 05

  Seeing symptoms like these in a loved one? It could be time to ask their doctor about Rexulti, Rexiprazole 2mg. The first FDA-approved treatment for this condition. Rexulti is proven to reduce agitation symptoms. Rexulti should not be used as an as-needed treatment. Elderly people with dementia-related psychosis have increased risk of death or stroke. Report fever, stiff muscles, and confusion, which can be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High blood sugar can lead to coma or death. Weight gain, increased cholesterol, unusual urges, dizziness on standing, falls, seizures, trouble swallowing, or sleepiness may occur. Learn more about these and other side effects at rexulti.com. Tap ad for PI.

• 40:07Speaker 06

  I'm glad I asked for help.

• 40:09Speaker 05

  Ask your loved one's doctor about Rexulti.

• 40:13Speaker 02

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• 40:37Speaker 01

  My six-year-old little sister is taken from her bed and violently murdered, and we don't have any answers? It's been 30 years. It's not okay. We will find this person. It's not a question of if, but when.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  Who killed JonBenet Ramsey? You think you know this mystery? But do you know about the DNA at the crime scene? Can science finally solve this case? And who is Unknown Male 1?

• 40:57Speaker 07

  An intruder, a third-party male. So Unknown Male 1 is out there somewhere. Yes.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  The stunning, all-new Diane Sawyer investigation, Friday night on ABC.