Themes: Inventors, Experiments Gone Awry, Nothing Goes Right
Main Cast: Fred MacMurray, Nancy Olson, Keenan Wynn, Tommy Kirk, Leon Ames
Release Year: 1961
Country: US
Run Time: 97 minutes
MPAA Rating: G
Plot
One of Disney's most entertaining forays into live-action, this hit family comedy stars Fred MacMurray as a college professor so forgetful that he missed his own wedding twice. He creates an extremely resilient flying rubber, dubbed "Flubber," and manages to make his old Model-T bounce all the way to Washington, DC, where it is mistaken for a UFO, as well as helping the college basketball team win the big game with Flubber-powered sneakers. MacMurray is a lot of fun in the title role, ably supported by a cast including Tommy Kirk, Keenan Wynn and Leon Ames, although the central romance between MacMurray and huffy bride-to-be Nancy Olson gets a bit annoying in its repetitiveness. In all, however, this is one of the best children's films of the '60s, and is highly recommended. A sequel, Son of Flubber, followed, with a remake simply titled Flubber appearing in 1997. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
Review
If you can tear the kids away from the computer-generated flash of Flubber, the inferior 1997 remake, The Absent Minded Professor provides ample amounts of Disney slapstick for an afternoon of laughs. The film reunited much of the same team that made The Shaggy Dog a success two years earlier, including Fred MacMurray, exuding his warm, bumbling charm, and writer Bill Walsh. Keenan Wynn appears as an appropriately nasty villain. The story is classic Disney: Right and wrong are clearly defined, and there are plenty of down-home American values. Also like most Disney fare of the era, the material is aimed squarely at children, and there isn't much to engage their older chaperones. ~ Matthew Doberman, All Movie Guide
Carroll Clark - Art Director, Robert Stevenson - Director, Cotton Warburton - Editor, George Bruns - Composer (Music Score), Edward Colman - Cinematographer, Walt Disney - Producer, Peter Ellenshaw - Special Effects, Eustace Lycett - Special Effects, Robert Mattey - Special Effects, Bill Walsh - Screenwriter, Samuel W. Taylor - Short Story Author
The Absent-Minded Professor is a 1961 Walt Disney Pictures film based on the short story "A Situation of Gravity", by Samuel W. Taylor. The film was reissued to theaters in 1967 and 1975, and released to video in 1981, 1986, and 1992. It was a huge success at the box-office, and has been remade twice since - once as a version for television starring Harry Anderson of TV's Night Court as the Professor, and once more as a theatrical film entitled Flubber, with Robin Williams as the Professor. Neither remake was as successful or is as highly regarded as the original, but the 1997 Robin Williams version was still a considerable success. Both remakes were made in color.
The original 1961 film, shot in black-and-white, was one of the first Disney films to be colorized, for the 1986 video release, and along with The Shaggy Dog (1959) and Son of Flubber, is one of Disney's few black-and-white films made after the silent film era.
Professor Brainard is an absent-minded professor of physical chemistry at Medfield College who invents a substance that gains energy when it strikes a hard surface. This discovery follows some blackboard scribbling in which he reverses a sign in the equation for enthalpy to energy plus (rather than minus which is incorrect) pressure times volume. Brainard names his discovery Flubber, for "flying rubber". In the excitement of his discovery, he misses his own wedding to Betsy Carlisle, not for the first time. Subplots include another professor's wooing the disappointed Miss Carlisle, Biff Hawk's ineligibility for basketball due to failing Brainard's class, Alonzo Hawk's schemes to gain wealth by means of Flubber, the school's financial difficulties and debt to Mr. Hawk, and Brainard's attempts to interest the government and military in uses for Flubber.
Looking for backers, he bounces his Flubber ball for an audience, but his investment pitch proves so long-winded that most of the crowd has left before they notice that the ball bounced higher on its second bounce than on its first. For a more successful demonstration, he makes his Model T fly by bombarding Flubber with radioactive particles. Other adventures and misadventures result as Flubber is used on the bottoms of basketball players' shoes (in a crucial game) giving them tremendous jumping ability; Brainard (at a school dance) making him an accomplished dancer, and the scheming businessman (who must be tackled by a full football team to bring him down after Brainard tricks him into testing Flubber on the bottom of his shoes). Eventually, Brainard shows his discovery to the government and also wins back Miss Carlisle, culminating in a successful wedding at last.
Ed Wynn and son Keenan Wynn appear together in this film; Keenan's son Ned also appears uncredited in a bit part. The elder Wynn plays the Fire Chief (an inside joke, as Wynn hosted the popular radio program 'The Fire Chief' for most of the 1930's). Keenan also played Alonzo Hawk in the sequel Son of Flubber and again in Herbie Rides Again (1974).
This film was followed by a sequel Son of Flubber, released in 1963 also featuring MacMurray, Olson, Reid, the three Wynns (Ed Wynn as a Hank Kimball-like county agent and Ned as the student manager of Rutland's football team), Hewitt (as District Attorney) and Kirk.
The film was remade in 1988 as a TV movie with Harry Anderson and Mary Page Keller as the renamed characters Prof. Henry Crawford and Ellen Whitley; and in 1997 as the theatrical motion picture Flubber, starring Robin Williams as the slightly renamed Prof. Philip Brainard and Marcia Gay Harden as his love interest, Dr. Sara Jean Reynolds. Nancy Olson had a cameo in the remake.
