The Absent-Minded Professor
Disney’s live-action follow-up to 1959’s smash hit My Three Sons patriarch took on the role of the brilliant but forgetful chemist Professor Ned Brainard.
The likeable Medfield College professor is so engrossed in
conducting experiments in his garage/lab, he misses his own wedding…
three times. Tiring of his act, Ned's lovely fiance Betsy starts
seeing nerdy Professor Ashton, and to make matters worse, local tycoon
Alonzo Hawk threatens to turn beloved Medfield into an estate.
After a botched experiment blows up Brainard’s garage, he discovers
he has accidentally invented a flying rubber, which he dubs “flubber.”
The gravity-defying substance sets up the film’s best comedic segments:
Brainard applies it to the Medfield basketball team’s gym shoes at
halftime, sticks it on his own shoes at a school dance, and even
converts his old Model T into a flying machine. Naturally, the greedy
Hawk wants the goo for himself, forcing Brainard to attempt to fly to
Washington, D.C., to plead his case.
The Absent-Minded Professor was a showcase for MacMurray’s
easygoing charm, which proved more than up to the task. The film was
another family classic, and the professor and his creation returned in
1963 for Son of Flubber. The film itself was remade in 1997 as Flubber,
with Robin Williams in the Professor’s role, introducing a new
generation of kids to the bouncy, rubbery antics of the Absent-Minded
Professor's prized invention.
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