From 1961, in my "imaginary movie project," it's "The Absent-Minded Professor."

As you may remember, I am rewatching movies — one for each year beginning in 1960 — that I saw in the theater when they originally came out — for fun and to compare my present-day reaction to what I can remember feeling when I was young. For 1961, when I was 10 years old, I watched "The Absent-Minded Professor."



1. The professor, played by Fred MacMurray, was really only "absent-minded" about one thing: the woman he was supposed to marry. As the movie begins, he is forgetting to attend his own wedding after already missing 2 attempted weddings — not weddings to different women. There's just one woman and he can't seem to remember to show up to get married to her, and she's about ready to give up. Of course, it's obvious that in the end he will marry her, but I'm sure I worried a lot more about this problem when I was 10. These days, I'm just a little annoyed that the woman's role is to be the long-suffering but perfectly nice match for the man who's the only interesting person here.

2. You'd think a professor would have a professional lab and assistants, but the professor putters around in a shed in his backyard assisted only by a cute dog who listens to his narration. The professor creates "Flubber" (flying rubber) through some freewheeling experimentation that blows up the place. With no regard to public or personal safety, the professor puts the Flubber in his Model T Ford and goes flying about the town.

3. As a kid, I didn't understand much about how the world works, so I must have been open-minded about the flying car and the use of it to bounce on top of road-bound cars driven by people the professor needed to harass. I accepted it when Flubber was smeared on basketball shoes so that the professor's home team could win a basketball game by bouncing over their opponents. To me now, the behavior with the car was a criminal assault and the intervention in the basketball game was cheating.

4. This Disney movie, like so many Hollywood movies, has a businessman as the villain. This character somehow thinks he can gain possession of the powerful invention that is Flubber by simply stealing the car, a problem the professor deals with not by using law enforcement but by putting Flubber on his own shoes and jumping this way and that until he's stolen the car back.  If you think people bouncing higher and higher is hilarious, then this is your movie.

5. There was never an explanation for how people who had leaped very high into the air were capable of repeatedly landing on their feet and not falling over or getting hurt. If you worry about that, it's not so funny. The businessman villain got his comeuppance when he's tricked into putting Flubber on his shoes and jumping from the second story of his house. He then bounces up and down over and over until the football team is brought in to tackle him. I can't remember how this made me feel when I was 10, but rewatching, I felt that Disney was inviting children to laugh at a man who was being tortured. We were supposed to hate him because he was a businessman and therefore cared about nothing but money, and so we were expected to laugh at him being repeatedly hurled a hundred feet into the air and slammed back onto the ground. Of course, he always landed on his feet, so the Flubber on his shoes relaunched him. Why didn't he ever fall on his ass? He didn't have Flubber on his ass, so wouldn't the bouncing have ended if only he'd fallen flat?

6. You can see I don't recommend this movie. I didn't expect to enjoy it very much, but I saw very few movies in 1961, and if I hadn't picked this, I'd have had to pick a cartoon — "101 Dalmatians." Maybe I made the wrong choice.

7. I did amuse myself by theorizing that the movie was about sexual frustration. The man can't consummate his relationship with a woman, but he does succeed in making a substance that gets everything up. Eventually, it's enough — he's bounced high and hard and long enough — that he can finally satisfy her.