Michael Todd Jr. on AllMovie

The man credited with conceiving both Smell-o-Vision and one of the most notoriously nauseating scenes in Cinerama history, Michael Todd Jr. was a true film experimentalist whose ideas paved the way for many future innovators in the land of celluloid. Born the son of producer Michael Todd in Los Angeles, Todd Jr. received his college education at Amherst before joining his father's production company as vice president. Later joining the navy before taking over the company following his father's untimely death in an airplane crash, one of Todd Jr.'s early projects as head of production was the Smell-o-Vision feature Scent of Mystery (1960). Utilizing numerous scents pumped into theaters in small tubes beneath the seats to create an unprecedented sense of atmosphere, the process proved successful but was quickly forgotten after the film received lackluster reviews. Later writing the teleplay to a documentary about his father and producing such efforts as The Bell Jar (1979), the reverberations of Todd Jr.'s experiments were still being felt in the new millennium when Munich-based designer Stefan Reutz announced the development of a new system that would operate as an updated version of Smell-o-Vision. Remarrying after his first wife died in 1972, Todd Jr. fathered eight children in his two marriages, and upon his death from lung cancer in May of 2002, was survived by his second wife, children, a stepmother, and a half-sister. He was 72.