The Absent-Minded Professor

The Absent-Minded Professor is a 1961 Walt Disney Pictures film starring Fred MacMurray as title character Ned Brainard and Nancy Olson as his girlfriend, Betsy Carlisle. It is based on the short story A Situation of Gravity, by Samuel W. Taylor.

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, reflecting the on or by the system? over whether negative work is done on vs. by the system. He calls it flubber, for "flying rubber". 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. Eventually, he shows his discovery to the government.

The film was reissued to theaters in 1967 and 1975, and released to video in 1981, 1986, and 1992. The film, shot in black-and-white, is one of the first Disney films to be colorized, for the 1986 video release.

Son of Flubber, released in 1963, is a sequel.

Trivia

Medfield College was also the setting of a trio of Disney Studio films from 1969-1975 starring Kurt Russell as Dexter Riley, Joe Flynn as Dean Higgins, Cesar Romero as A.J. Arno and Michael McGreevey as Shuyler: The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Now You See Him, Now You Don't and The Strongest Man in the World.

Keenan Wynn also played Alonzo Hawk in Herbie Rides Again (1974).

Remakes

It 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 interst, Dr. Sara Jean Reynolds.

References

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Trivia

Remakes

References