The Absent-Minded Professor

Release Date: March 16, 1961

Watch Date: January 16 – January 18, 2024

“THE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR contains two essential elements for laughter — Fred MacMurray and Flubber, his gravity-defying formula for flying rubber! You’ll visit Medfield College and delight in the fun when Professor Brainard (Fred MacMurray) uses Flubber to put more bounce in the basketball team, fly a Model “T” Jalopy over Washington, D.C., and save Medfield College from financial ruin! Join a brilliant cast full of your favorite Disney stars: Ed Wyne as Medfield’s bumbling Fire Chief, Keenan Wynn as the evil-minded Alonzo Hawk, and Nancy Olson as the college secretary who the Professor has absent-mindedly left at the altar…three times!”

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    Have you ever seen Flubber?

    This is like ‘Flubber’, but decades earlier, without Robin Williams, and is also the movie Flubber is based off of, but I bet you’ve watched ‘Flubber’ and not ‘The Absent-Minded Professor’. Because that’s the order that I’d seen them in, and it’s hard not to have my brain compare and contrast, but with ‘The Absent-Minded Professor’ as the remake.

    And to me, if it were the remake, it comes off a lot weaker.

    I think a lot of this is the characterization of Betsy. If she knows who Ned is well enough to marry him, she should have been at the house and arrived at the wedding with him. And of course she couldn’t be a fellow professor. She has to be a secretary. She has to immediately step out with some other dude, who immediately proposes marriage to her. Her fiancé mentions that he was in an explosion and she barely bats an eye!

    But Brainard is kind of charming, in his very willing to drive someone absolutely insane and lead them to get into potential life threatening car crashes at high speed kind of way. He loves his dog, which I will always appreciate it, and he’ll do anything to get his girl – except show up to the wedding.

    I think the basketball scene lasted way too long, that’s my main complaint. What starts off as fun way of showing the potential of flubber just becomes a drag, and you start to wonder when Disney will run out of ways to show people jumping impressively. Also, I get that dunking is very cool, but if they actually wanted to beat the other team, you think they’d shoot 3 pointers. Is that the correct term? I don’t watch basketball. It’s not big in Canada. At least not where I live. And, Biff didn’t really need to be in the film at all, I think he’s only in it because the actor was pretty famous at the time. He isn’t really on the side of the villain, nor is he on the side of the professor. He’s not a motivating factor in his father’s evil scheme. He’s just kinda…there. He’s a pointless character.

    All in all, it’s a solid film, and Bob laughed through most of the latter half – and I’ve seen him watch newer films utterly deadpan the whole way through. Is this a movie we’re going to pop on at every opportunity? No. He’ll pick ‘Flubber’ over ‘The Absent-Minded Professor’ every day of the week. But when we’re in the mood for a black-and-white Disney classic? I think this could absolutely scratch that itch.