Hail the Dawn of Taste-O-Vision

A tipster sent along word of tonight's DVD premiere for Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating, likely the best doc you'll ever see about an ex-nude model/sperm donor/window washer-turned-world-record-breaking glutton. But while I love a good competitive eating chronicle as much as the next guy, the more striking promise on the de facto press release indicates that the DVD features a technological innovation to end all innovations. Blu-Ray, ahem, eat your heart out:

TASTE-O-VISION is the most exciting thing to happen to the motion picture industry since the addition of sound. This ground breaking, new technology, allows viewers to experience film on a whole new sensory level. The audience is involved on a dimension beyond just sight and sound. One can literally taste the action. ...

Our team of flavor modeling engineers, psycho-physicists and neuroscientists has spent years experimenting on how the human tongue, taste buds, palate, pharynx and epiglottis respond to and receive flavor information and how this information is processed and shaped on its way to the central nervous system. They have done cutting edge work to remap the human tongue and unravel the mysterious flavor profiles of such complex food compounds as: beer, hot dogs, sushi, coffee, butter and oysters. With this data they are able to recreate the taste experience as it happens on screen and evoke a lifelike oral experience in the flavor receptor cells of the moviegoer.

Indeed, you know you can buy into anything a "psycho-physicist" has had a latex-gloved hand in. We hear Pixar is scrambling to mimic the formula for its DVD extras on Ratatouille, and Warner Bros. is shelving No Reservations a la The Weinstein Company until its own lab rats can summon the taste of Catherine Zeta-Jones' fish. (Insert Michael Douglas joke here. On second thought, don't.) I offer no warranties on Taste-O-Vision's legitimacy, but only pass along its endorsement by the formidable likes of pro eaters Eric "Badlands" Booker and "Hungry" Charles Hardy ("While watching Taste-O-Vision I had the urge to eat against myself in an unsanctioned peanut butter and jelly eating event without the bread!"). "Delicious" doesn't begin to describe the anticipation.

Posted at July 24, 2007 7:13 AM