The Absent-Minded Professor

Ned Brainard is a science professor at a small college whose experiments routinely distract him from everything else, including his long-suffering fiancée Betsy. After a lab mishap leaves him with a strange substance that gains energy whenever it meets a solid surface, he realises he has created an anti-gravity material he calls Flubber. He uses it to give the college's hopeless basketball team an edge and to send his modified Model T into the air, but his attempts to win Betsy back are complicated by a scheming businessman who wants the discovery for himself.

The film was directed by Robert Stevenson, the seventh of the fourteen features he directed in chronological order, following Kidnapped and preceding Son of Flubber. Bill Walsh wrote the screenplay, Walt Disney produced, and Fred MacMurray leads the cast as Ned, with Nancy Olson as Betsy, Keenan Wynn as Alonzo P. Hawk and Tommy Kirk among the thirty credited players.

Made by Walt Disney Productions for about two million dollars, the film runs 96 minutes. On IMDb it holds a 6.7 rating from around ten thousand votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.5 from roughly two hundred votes, showing a fairly consistent audience response. A critics' rating of 7.3 from twenty-three reviews puts professional assessments above the audience scores on both sites.