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The Absent-Minded Professor (1961) on Netflix

Approved19611h 32mComedyFamilySci-Fi

Ned Brainard, a physical chemistry professor at Medfield College, misses his third wedding to Betsy Carlisle. He calls the material he has made Flubber, and the banker Alonzo P. Hawk wants it.

  • Netflix3.6/5
  • IMDb6.7/1010,210 votes
  • Rotten Tomatoes83%

Trailer

Plot summary

Ned Brainard teaches physical chemistry at Medfield College, and his laboratory work comes before everything else, including his own wedding to Betsy Carlisle, which he misses for the third time. The material he has produced gains energy whenever it strikes a hard surface, and he calls it Flubber. The college owes money to the banker Alonzo P. Hawk. Biff Hawk, Alonzo's son and the team's best basketball player, has failed Ned's class and so cannot play in the game against archrival Rutland. Alonzo sees a fortune in Flubber and wants the material for himself. Shelby Ashton, another professor, courts the disappointed Betsy Carlisle.

Cast

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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Absent-Minded Professor (1961)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

  • Walt Disney saw Hubert Alyea's "Dr. Boom" demonstrations at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, told him he had given him an idea for a film, and flew him to California to demonstrate for Fred MacMurray, who mimicked Alyea's mannerisms in the role.
  • The title character, Professor Ned Brainard, was based in part on Hubert Alyea, a Princeton chemistry professor known as "Dr. Boom" for his explosive demonstrations.
  • Ed Wynn's memory was fading while he made the film and he could not remember his lines, so he improvised much of his dialogue, with the crew told to "just let him go on and on" because of his imagination.
  • Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman wrote the film's "Medfield Fight Song", the first song the brothers ever wrote for a Disney feature.
  • The Absent-Minded Professor became the first Disney film ever to have a sequel, Son of Flubber, released in 1963.
  • The special effects, which used the sodium screen matte process along with miniatures and wire-supported mockups, were made by Robert A. Mattey and Eustace Lycett, who were nominated for an Academy Award for them.
  • Medfield College of Technology returned as the setting for Son of Flubber and for a later Disney trilogy, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969), Now You See Him, Now You Don't (1972) and The Strongest Man in the World (1975), each starring Kurt Russell and Cesar Romero.
  • The film's name lives on in chemistry: several rubbery chemical compounds have been named Flubber in honor of the substance at the heart of The Absent-Minded Professor.

Stills

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