Movies - The Absent-Minded Professor

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	Movies - 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 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 dispute between chemists vs. physicists and engineers 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 is 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, has the dubious distinction of being one of the first Disney films to be colorized, for the 1986 video release.

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

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.

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