I tend to poke my way into various the novel-ish threads here at AW and write a movie-ish response to many of them.
Here I go again:
Back in the 1950's, as a way to compete with the ever-growing threat of television, the American film industry launuched the 3-D movie market. That lasted for only a few years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-D_film
Several 3-D revivals have been attempted since the 1950's, (one flash-in-the-pan revival in the 80's, and now another one is under way at this moment), but for the most part, it was just a dumb gimmick and proved more of a distraction than anything else.
In the 1970's, when movie theatre sound systems began getting very sophisticated, and concert-quality speaker sytems were being installed in threatres, another gimmick was briefly delved into: "Sensurround" where the theatres boasted that
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensurround
the sound quality was so intense and so loud that your theatre seat would literally shake. The only real accomplishment was a "rumbling" noise so most of the films shot in Sensurround were disaster films or action films with lots of explosions. The most famous Sensurround film was the not-at-all bad disaster film
Earthquake by the famous disaster filmmaker Irwin Allen. Others were
Rollercoaster and
Midway. This development also failed when it proved too expensive to be bothered with, was limited only to dissaster and explosion films, and with the growing trend toward multi-screen cineplexes, theatre owners with a Sensurround film showing on one screen, and a more quiet film on an adjacent screen, often got complaints from the patrons of that adjacent screen that the rumbling was interfering with their movie.
And then there was the experimental attempt at Smell-O-Vision in the 1960 film
Scent of Mystery,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smellovision
which was met by technical difficulties so severe that it was deemd an utter diaster and quickly abandoned by Hollywood after that one and only film employed it. But in 1982, a satirical tribute to the failed legacy of Smell-o-vision was launched in the comedy film
Polyester which employed what was called "Odorama."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smellovision#Legacy
Unlike the 1960 debacle of a complex networking of pipes and vents that sprayed smells all over the theatre, movies shot in Odorama handed out scratch-n-sniff cards with the movie tickets. Each card had a complex pallette of scratch zones, and each zone was labeled by a number (I believe it was 1-12). At any point during the film, a number would briefly flash in the corner of the screen, prompting viewers to start scratching and sniffing the corresponding scratch zone. Odorama was used in several other films after
Polyester, but always as a joke, and it always proved a distraction to the film rather than an enhancement of it.