A brief history of dog cinema

[damerell]

ceb and I watched Gance's magnificent 1927 silent _Napoleon_ over the weekend, and it struck me midway through that of course dog cinema is still in black and white. The big innovation in dog cinema was "smellies", with the tragic attendant discovery that some of the stars of the anosmic screen actually smelled of lavender or something equally insufficiently stinky. Before smellies, dog cinemas employed half a dozen specially trained farting dogs on highly specific diets who generated all the smells on demand; the steam-powered scratch-and-sniff smell roll organ was not a success.