Keenan Wynn

Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Herbie Rides Again

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Herbie Rides Again

On the rare occasions that Walt Disney allowed sequels to his live-action features, they tended to feel less like continuations and more like extensions. Son Of Flubber came about because gags intended for The Absent-Minded Professor were cut during the scripting stage. Davy Crockett and Merlin Jones were both TV productions that ended up on the big screen and they feel like it. But when writer/producer Bill Walsh and director Robert Stevenson decided to bring back The Love Bug in Herbie Rides Again, they were obliged to mix things up a bit.

If there’s a definitive oral history on the making of the Herbie movies out there, I haven’t found it yet. As a result, I’ll be speculating a bit more than I’d like on the background of Herbie Rides Again. I apologize if I’m completely off-base on anything. But I think it’s fair to say that Disney wanted to make a proper sequel to The Love Bug with stars Dean Jones, Buddy Hackett and Michele Lee. I don’t know if Hackett and Lee were approached but Jones evidently was. In an interview with the Herbie fansite Herbiemania, Jones says he didn’t think the script for Herbie Rides Again was up to the standards of the original. He’s not wrong.

With Jones taking a hard pass and Hackett and Lee either turning it down or not even being asked to return, Walsh had to find another thread to connect Herbie Rides Again to The Love Bug. Naturally, he turned to Helen Hayes, the First Lady of American Theatre. This was not her first exposure to Disney. Her son, James MacArthur, had been a Disney star from 1958 to 1960 and Hayes herself made a cameo appearance in his mountain-climbing movie Third Man On The Mountain. Hayes began enjoying a late career resurgence around 1970 when she won an Oscar for her role in Airport. She wouldn’t have been the first person I’d have thought of to star opposite a sentient VW Bug but I guess it works.

Hayes plays Mrs. Steinmetz, the aunt of Buddy Hackett’s Tennessee Steinmetz (again, not the first person I would think of). Tennessee is off in Tibet on some sort of spiritual quest with his guru and Jones’ Jim Douglas has abandoned Herbie to race cars in Europe, leaving Mrs. Steinmetz alone in the old firehouse with Herbie and a couple other pieces of living machinery, an orchestrion and a decommissioned cable car named Old No. 22.

So far, none of this makes much sense. I don’t buy the idea that Jim Douglas would head to Europe without Herbie, especially given what happens in later Herbie movies. The Love Bug spent a lot of time establishing what a sensitive flower Herbie can be. The car tried to commit suicide when he thought Jim didn’t like him anymore. Herbie should probably be in therapy instead of taking a little old lady on weekly trips to the market. But this is Herbie Rides Again, not a Bergman movie. Best to let it go.

Like Jim Douglas and Tennessee Steinmetz, bad guy Peter Thorndyke (David Tomlinson) sits this one out. Instead, Walsh and Stevenson bring back Alonzo Hawk (Keenan Wynn), the Flubber-coveting villain from The Absent-Minded Professor and its sequel. Hawk has done well since leaving Medfield for the Bay Area. He’s now a super-rich industrialist with plans to construct the world’s tallest skyscraper. Maybe Hawk should give some pointers to Medfield’s current adversary, A.J. Arno. That’s right, Herbie Rides Again connects to the Flubber movies which themselves connect to the Dexter Riley movies. The shared DisneyVerse is a vast and complicated place.

Walsh and Stevenson still needed a pair of romantic leads to fill in for Jones and Lee. Stefanie Powers from The Boatniks takes leading lady duties. This would be her last Disney movie. After this, she continued as a go-to guest star on dozens of TV shows before landing the role she’d become most famous for on Hart To Hart opposite Robert Wagner in 1979. She still acts from time to time, so it’s possible she could pop up in this column again.

The male lead was Ken Berry, a song-and-dance man who’d become a popular sitcom star on shows like F Troop and Mayberry R.F.D. I had remembered Berry starring in a ton of Disney movies throughout the 1970s but he’ll actually only be in this column once more. But he was all over television during that time, popping up on The Carol Burnett Show, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island and lots more.

Herbie Rides Again opens with a montage of stock footage depicting the demolition of various old buildings as Alonso Hawk watches and gleefully participates in their destruction from the safety of his limo. After the opening credits, we find ourselves in Rome where Hawk’s in the back of a taxi (driven by Disney regular Vito Scotti) fantasizing about destroying the Coliseum to make way for a shopping center. You might be thinking, “Oh, so the movie takes place in Italy?” Not at all. It’s literally just one scene with no explanation why we’re there and then Hawk’s right back in San Francisco.

These slapdash opening minutes accurately set the tone for what follows. None of this footage matches. The rear-projection work placing Hawk in Rome is some of the least convincing effects work you’ll ever witness. If you’re feeling charitable, you can take this as a sign that the movie will be more free-wheeling and anachronistic than its predecessor. If not, you can read it as the filmmakers admitting they do not care about this project. Honestly, both interpretations are correct.

Hawk’s plan to dominate the San Francisco skyline has run into a major snag: Mrs. Steinmetz, who refuses to leave the firehouse standing in the way. I love that an employee lifts the enormous model of Hawk’s building to reveal a little firehouse model hiding beneath it. Anyway, none of Hawk’s high-priced lawyers (most of whom are familiar Disney faces) have been able to get Mrs. Steinmetz to play ball. When Hawk’s milquetoast nephew, Willoughby Whitfield (Berry), shows up fresh out of law school, he hires him on the spot and sends him off to deal with the old lady.

Willoughby is pretty sure Mrs. Steinmetz is off her rocker when she starts talking to Herbie and Old No. 22. Just as he’s getting ready to have her committed, a pretty flight attendant named Nicole (Powers) turns up. Nicole was Mrs. Steinmetz’s neighbor until Hawk tore down her apartment building and left her homeless. Mrs. Steinmetz took her in and now Nicole affectionately calls her “Grandma”. Thanks to her history with Hawk, Nicole immediately sizes up Willoughby as an enemy and punches him in the face.

Before Nicole can do any more damage, Willoughby pleads his case. The neighborhood looks like a war zone, the firehouse is falling apart and the crazy old lady talks to her car. Nicole can’t do anything about those first two points but decides to clear up that last one by taking Willoughby for a ride in Herbie. You can probably guess how that goes, except you can’t because Herbie takes them to some kind of Renaissance Fair to participate in a joust/game of chicken. Wait, was Herbie Rides Again the secret inspiration behind George A. Romero’s Knightriders?

The upshot of all this is Willoughby decides he wants nothing to do with his uncle’s shady dealings and Mrs. Steinmetz decides Nicole and Willoughby have crazy-hot chemistry. Willoughby screws up his courage to confront Hawk face-to-face but chickens out when he hears his uncle’s latest apoplectic tirade. Instead, he quits over the phone, dons a fake beard as a disguise and runs to the airport.

Hawk decides to take care of things himself. For whatever reason, he’s figured out that Herbie is the key to this whole thing and steals it (sorry, him…I’m not 100% clear on Herbie’s preferred pronouns). Then he makes the mistake of insulting Herbie and all bets are off. Herbie takes control and creates a huge traffic nightmare before unceremoniously dumping Hawk on the sidewalk outside his office.

Now Hawk tasks his lawyers with getting the car but Herbie has taken Mrs. Steinmetz out shopping. Mrs. Steinmetz calmly reviews her shopping list while Herbie deals with the lawyers, driving through a fancy hotel, climbing to the top of a parking garage and leaping between buildings, even driving straight up the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge. Once again, Disney weirdly cheaps out on some of the least special special effects on film. The Golden Gate gag is particularly bad. The scale is all wrong and somehow Hawk’s secretary (Elaine Devry) is able to see what’s happening from miles away.

Herbie and Mrs. Steinmetz make it home to find Nicole, who ran into Willoughby at the airport and convinced him to help fight Hawk. Mrs. S. sees an opportunity for a little matchmaking and sends the potential lovebirds off to the store, ordering Herbie to keep them occupied for a little while. They end up at the beach. While love blossoms and Herbie cavorts in the sand like an excited puppy, Hawk’s chauffeur (Ivor Barry) bribes an old-timey fisherman (Arthur Space) to block the only access road. With the young folks and that meddling car out of the picture, Hawk intends on swooping in to pack up all of Mrs. Steinmetz’s possessions.

Hawk’s diversion doesn’t work for long. Finding the road blocked, Herbie simply drives out to the end of a pier, leaps in and navigates back to shore the long way, much to the astonishment of both sharks and surfers. Returning to their empty home, our undaunted heroes decide to retrieve their stolen goods from Hawk’s warehouse. They get everything back and Herbie helps them escape a pair of hapless security guards (including recurring player Norm Grabowski in his final Disney appearance). On the way home, Old No. 22 picks up a drunk but flirtatious passenger, Mr. Judson (John McIntire, last seen in The Light In The Forest, giving the funniest performance in the whole movie).

The next day, Mrs. Steinmetz goes to meet with Hawk face-to-face. Willoughby follows her and arrives just in time to see her drive Herbie onto an enormous window-washers’ platform. They make it to the 28th floor where Hawk is on the phone with a demolition guy named Loostgarten (Chuck McCann, later a very prolific voice actor including Duckworth on the series DuckTales). Hawk’s done messing around and wants Loostgarten to knock the firehouse down tonight, permit or no permit.

Of course you realize there’s a reason Stevenson introduced this comically oversized window-washer, right? Sure enough, an incensed Mrs. Steinmetz hits Hawk full-force with a stream of suds. Once the office is full of bubbles, Herbie drives in and chases Hawk through the halls and out onto the window ledge. Before Herbie can outright murder Hawk, Mrs. Steinmetz threatens to trade him in if he doesn’t calm down.

Back home, Nicole and Willoughby concoct a plan. Willoughby impersonates his uncle and gets Loostgarten on the phone. Telling him there’s been a change of plans, Willoughby gives Loostgarten Hawk’s home address instead. That night, Hawk is understandably having trouble sleeping, suffering PTSD-induced nightmares where he’s chased by Demon-Herbies with razor-sharp teeth or he’s Kong atop the Empire State Building menaced by Flying Herbies trying to shoot him down with motor oil. Loostgarten wakes him up, calling to verify the new address, at which point Hawk gives the OK to demolish his own house.

The next morning, Hawk finally admits defeat and announces he’s turned over a new leaf. Willoughby and Nicole go to Fisherman’s Wharf for a celebratory dinner but Mrs. Steinmetz stays in, partly to give the young folks some space but mostly to entertain her own gentleman caller, Mr. Judson. It’s a good thing they stayed behind. Hawk was, of course, lying through his teeth and has assembled an army of bulldozers and wrecking balls to bring Hell to Mrs. Steinmetz’s front door.

While Mrs. Steinmetz and Judson hold the fort, Herbie manages to break through the front line and fetch Nicole and Willoughby. Speeding back to the firehouse, Herbie uses his psychic Herbie powers or something to mobilize an entire armada of sentient, driverless Volkswagen Beetles. They come from garages, from junkyards, from driveways, from drive-in movies (still carrying the seemingly frozen young lovers in the backseat). The Bugs thwart the bad guys and Hawk runs into the Traffic Commissioner again, who hauls him off to either jail or an insane asylum. Willoughby and Nicole end up getting married because why wouldn’t they and everyone lives happily ever after. Except, perhaps, for San Francisco’s many Volkswagen owners whose cars mysteriously vanished one night and never returned.

So yeah, Herbie Rides Again is not what you could call a good movie. I wouldn’t even say it’s a particularly well-made movie. That being said, I had some fun with it. Without any returning characters from The Love Bug, Stevenson and Walsh couldn’t continue Herbie’s story in any meaningful way. And let’s face it, does anyone really want Herbie’s story continued in a “meaningful” way? So Stevenson and Walsh went another direction and cranked up the zaniness to eleven. On that score, it delivers.

Even so, being weird and goofy can only carry a movie so far. It would be really nice if more of that weirdness was intentional. I don’t think Stevenson intended for the lousy chroma-key effects to be an ironic commentary on the illusion of cinema. They’re just cheap, lazy effects. The relationship between Mrs. Steinmetz and Mr. Judson is genuinely cute and funny. I’d love it if the movie focused more on them or invested Willoughby and Nicole with half as much personality. In the end, I felt like I enjoyed Herbie Rides Again in spite of everyone’s efforts, not because of them.

Despite its shortcomings, audiences were ready to welcome Herbie back. Herbie Rides Again came out in England first before opening in America on June 6, 1974. Most critics seemed to feel the same way I do about the movie. They admitted it wasn’t very good but they weren’t mad about it. It went on to become Disney’s highest-grossing film of the year, just barely missing the top ten. Helen Hayes even got a Golden Globe nomination for the movie, possibly just for emerging with her dignity intact.

It’s hard to say whether or not Walt Disney would have greenlit any sequels to The Love Bug. On the one hand, it was an enormous hit. But that might actually have protected it in Walt’s mind. He might have felt a sequel would cheapen whatever magic made The Love Bug special. But with Walt gone, the studio couldn’t afford to leave money on the table. After Herbie Rides Again proved The Love Bug’s success was no fluke, you knew full well that Herbie would return.

VERDICT: It’s a Disney Plus for the Demon-Herbies alone but it’s not great.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Snowball Express

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Snowball Express

If Disney’s live action comedies prove anything, it’s that the line between predictability and familiarity lies entirely within the eye of the beholder. To the jaded critic, the studio’s reliance on formulaic stories and a stable of stars that are rarely allowed to venture out of their comfort zones can give the films a cookie-cutter sameness that dulls the senses. But those same qualities can be tremendously comforting to kids and nostalgic adults. The comfort of the familiar goes a long way toward explaining the appeal of Snowball Express.

There has been no shortage of familiar faces in this column. In fact, it’s rare for a Disney movie released between, say, 1960 and 1980 to feature a completely fresh cast of newcomers. Snowball Express is probably the biggest showcase for the Disney Repertory Players so far. Practically every single person on screen has appeared in this column before, many of them on multiple occasions. And since Disney actors were never really required to stretch or challenge themselves, you can rest assured that everyone slides into their roles as easily as a favorite pair of slippers. There’s no confusion or ambiguity in Disney. Dean Jones is always the slightly befuddled good guy. Keenan Wynn is always the corrupt bad guy. So it was written, so it shall be.

Snowball Express is based on a book called Chateau Bon Vivant by Frankie and Johnny O’Rear. The book is actually a memoir about a couple with no experience in the hospitality industry trying to run a Canadian ski lodge. Screenwriters Don Tait, Jim Parker and Arnold Margolin seemingly ignored everything about the book except the most basic premise. More than anything, the movie resembles Monkeys, Go Home!, another movie where Dean Jones inherits a dilapidated property from a relative he never knew and upends his life to pursue a difficult career he’s never attempted before.

By the way, all three of those screenwriters were essentially TV guys. Jim Parker and Arnold Margolin had worked together on such sitcoms as The Andy Griffith Show and they’d adapted Neil Simon’s play Star Spangled Girl into a movie starring Disney alum Sandy Duncan. Don Tait had written a lot of westerns, including Maverick and The Virginian. Tait stayed at Disney through the end of the 1970s. We’ll see his name again soon. Parker and Margolin didn’t continue at Disney or even as a writing team much longer but they both remained active, mostly in television, for years.

Producer Ron Miller brought back director Norman Tokar, who hadn’t made a movie at the studio since The Boatniks in 1970. In the interim, he’d directed a few episodes of The Doris Day Show and Dean Jones’ failed sitcom, The Chicago Teddy Bears, as well as several unsold pilots. Tokar would briefly leave Disney again after Snowball Express to direct the movie version of Wilson Rawls’ Where The Red Fern Grows. But he’d be back at his old stomping grounds soon enough.

In Monkeys, Go Home!, Jones played a bachelor attempting to run his great uncle’s olive grove in France. Here, Jones plays Johnny Baxter, a happily married father of two attempting to run his great uncle’s hotel in Silver Hill, Colorado. Nancy Olson appears as Johnny’s wife, Sue, in the last of her five Disney features (not counting her uncredited cameo in 1997’s Flubber, a nod to her role in the original Flubber pictures). Olson got saddled with a lot of thankless girlfriend/wife/mother roles at Disney and Snowball Express is no exception. She’s around to be a supportive helpmate and her character tends to vanish whenever anything fun is happening.

The Baxter kids, Richard and Chris, are played by red-headed scamp Johnny Whitaker and Kathleen Cody. This was Cody’s first Disney movie, coming off a stint on the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, but she’ll be back in this column soon. Whitaker, on the other hand, will not. After his three Disney features, he appeared in one more TV production, The Mystery In Dracula’s Castle. His next non-Disney project was the title role in Tom Sawyer, a big-screen musical with songs by the Sherman brothers and featuring his Napoleon And Samantha costar, Jodie Foster. He went back to TV after that, starring on Sid and Marty Krofft’s mind-warping Sigmund And The Sea Monsters. Whitaker left acting behind in the 1980s to attend college, perform missionary work overseas, and overcome addictions to drugs and alcohol. He’s still around and occasionally pops up on screen, as in Amazon Prime’s 2017 reboot of Sigmund.

Johnny (Baxter, not Whitaker) learns he’s inherited the Grand Imperial Hotel and immediately quits his job at a high-tech New York insurance company. (His boss, Mr. Carruthers, is played by Dick Van Patten in the first of many Disney appearances.) Nobody else in the family seems to think this is such a hot idea but since Johnny has left them no alternative, they begrudgingly pack up and move to Colorado.

Once they’ve arrived, none of the local yokels (led by George Lindsey, the voice of Lafayette in The AristoCats) have any idea where this so-called luxury hotel would be. Eventually they figure out Johnny must mean old Crazy Jake’s place and give him directions out toward the boondocks. The locals’ confusion seems a little disingenuous. Sure, the location is off the beaten path and the building is a bit run down but it’s still recognizably a hotel with its name in stained glass.

Despite the fact that the hotel isn’t the turn-key operation he’d hoped for, Johnny resolves to get rid of the bats and raccoons, clean the place up and open for business. That night, his first “guest” turns up in his kitchen. Jesse McCord (Harry Morgan, having a lot more fun than in either The Barefoot Executive or Scandalous John) is an old coot who was friends with Johnny’s uncle. Crazy Jake would let Jesse stay at the hotel free of charge if it wasn’t busy (and it rarely was). Johnny’s ready to kick Jesse out into the cold but his family asks him to think twice before sending an old man to freeze to death in a blizzard. Since Johnny is all heart, Jesse’s allowed to stay under the condition that he help get the hotel up and running.

In need of a small business loan to cover expenses, Johnny goes to visit local banker Martin Ridgeway (Keenan Wynn, naturally). The hotel is too great a risk for Ridgeway to approve a loan but he is willing to buy the place outright. Ridgeway claims he wants to turn the hotel into a home for orphans, but the eye-rolling of his secretary, Miss Wigginton (Disney veteran and professional eye-roller Mary Wickes, last seen in Napoleon And Samantha), suggests he has a less benevolent purpose in mind.

Johnny and Sue stroll around the property and run into Wally Perkins (played by Dexter Riley’s buddy Schuyler, Michael McGreevey), a young man nursing a crush on the Baxters’ daughter, Chris. Johnny, who apparently doesn’t understand how real estate works, is stunned to learn that not only does he own the hotel, his property extends as far as the eye can see. After thinking about it for way too long, Johnny has the revolutionary idea to open a ski lodge in Colorado. Of course, Johnny doesn’t know the first thing about skiing but figures he can pick it up as he goes along.

To avoid dealing with Ridgeway, he sets a meeting with a banker from the next town over. The banker loves Johnny’s idea but pulls out after Johnny lies about his skiing prowess and makes a disastrous run down Nightmare Alley, one of the area’s most dangerous slopes. When the incident makes the papers, Ridgeway has a change of heart. Claiming that the free publicity might give the Grand Imperial a fighting chance, he agrees to loan Johnny $3,000 to get started.

Johnny has big plans for that money but is forced to cut back when Wally and Jesse blow up the ancient water heater and destroy the kitchen. Instead of installing a new ski lift, Jesse fixes up an old steam engine to rig up a rope-tow. Working together, the crew manages to get the hotel ready for opening night. But despite their efforts, the debut looks like a disaster until an avalanche (inadvertently triggered by Wally) traps a train full of tourists bound for the more established ski resort. Riding to the rescue, the Baxters soon have a full house.

Things go well for awhile until, in time-honored Disney comedy fashion, they go spectacularly wrong. Wally, the newly anointed ski instructor, tumbles off a cliff and ends up hanging to a tree for dear life. Johnny is able to use the rope-tow to save him but a hot log burns through one of the support ropes, sending Jesse, Johnny and several tons of active steam engine careening down the mountain and through the hotel. Somehow nobody gets hurt, except for Wally who broke an arm when he fell off the cliff. Even so, the tourists all decide to spend the rest of their vacation in a hotel with intact walls.

Naturally this leaves Johnny unable to keep up with his payments to Ridgeway. Rather than sell, Johnny pins all his hopes on winning Silver Hill’s annual snowmobile race. The third place prize alone would cover what he owes, so Johnny figures he doesn’t even have to win to save the hotel. That would be a great plan if there were only three entrants. But considering that Johnny has no more experience on a snowmobile than he does in any other winter sport and the fact that he and Jesse are driving a beat-up old machine Wally Frankensteined together from past losers AND the fact that Ridgeway always wins, the odds are not stacked in his favor.

Sure enough, after a lengthy, Love Bug-esque race over, under and through the mountains, Johnny comes in dead last. He’s ready to admit defeat and sell to Ridgeway when Miss Wigginton finally reveals the reason for all her furious eye-rolling. Years ago, Johnny’s great uncle donated hundreds of acres of prime timberland to the local Indians for as long as they occupied the land. Since the last of them either died out or moved on years ago, all that land has reverted to the estate and Ridgeway intends to clearcut the whole thing.

Jesse adds another bit of local history, pointing out that the entire town sits on land donated by Uncle Jacob with a provision in the town charter that the founders would build a church, two hospitals (one for people and one for critters) and a library. Richard points out that, just as there’s no basement at the Alamo, there’s no library in Silver Hill. And while nobody’s 100% sure if that means Johnny now owns the entire town, the mere possibility is enough to get Ridgeway to change his tune. He extends Johnny’s line of credit and vows to do whatever it takes to get the Grand Imperial up and running again.

Needless to say, Snowball Express is not one of Disney’s most intricately plotted narratives. Neither is it a penetrating character examination of a marriage tested by the husband’s impulsive decisions, although what I wouldn’t give to see the Ingmar Bergman version of Snowball Express. No, this is just a silly movie about silly adventures in the snow. Sometimes that’s enough. Here, it’s almost enough.

First the good news. Unlike Monkeys, Go Home!, which took place in France but was shot in Burbank, Tokar actually took his cast and crew to Colorado. The movie was shot in Crested Butte and the Rocky Mountain scenery adds a lot of flavor. It’s the kind of setting you can’t replicate on a backlot, no matter how much fake snow you pump in.

The movie is really built around three main slapstick setpieces: Dean Jones’ out-of-control run down Nightmare Alley, the runaway steam engine, and the snowmobile race. They’re undeniably the highlights of the film and Tokar pulls them off nicely. The winter setting and cold weather gear also helps mask the stunt doubles for Jones, Harry Morgan, Keenan Wynn and George Lindsey, making the action sequences feel a lot more seamless than usual.

But whenever the movie isn’t hurtling down a mountain at breakneck speed, things begin falling apart. The opening scene at Johnny’s office is interminable, taking far too long to introduce a two-sentence premise. Once they get to Colorado, the hotel really doesn’t seem to be in that bad a condition but it still takes a lot of steps to get to opening night. And the less said about estate law, small business loans and town charters the better, right? Not according to Snowball Express, which brings these riveting topics up again and again.

Despite its flaws, Snowball Express was fun and charming enough to receive fairly positive reviews from critics upon its release on December 22, 1972. This was the same day Disney re-released The Sword In The Stone to theatres for the first time since 1963. I’m not sure if they were released together as a double feature or if they were competing against each other. Considering that the original campaign manual for Snowball Express makes no mention of Sword In The Stone, I’m guessing they played separately. The film made over $6 million at the box office. Not a blockbuster but pretty good for a live-action Disney movie at the time.

Snowball Express is a minor entry in the Disney catalog. I don’t think it’s a favorite of many people but it’s likable. It’s the sort of movie you don’t think about unless something actively reminds you of it and you say, “Oh, yeah. I kind of liked that when I was a kid.” Then you go find it on Disney+ and forget all about it again until the next time you need a nostalgic little jolt from your childhood. To borrow a phrase from another Disney movie, it’s the streaming circle of life.

VERDICT: It’s just enough fun to end up on the Disney Plus side but don’t push it. It is what it is.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Smith!

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Smith!

According to the 2010 Census, Smith remains the most common surname in the United States. It’s a name most of us encounter every day. If you’re not a Smith yourself, odds are you probably know one. But even if your name is Smith, I can guarantee you’ve never heard “Smith” said as frequently as you will in the 1969 film Smith! If you made it a drinking game, you would be passed out cold within the first hour.

The addition of the exclamation point does not make Smith! a more exciting title. The movie is based on the book Breaking Smith’s Quarter Horse by Paul St. Pierre, so I get why producer Bill Anderson, screenwriter Louis Pelletier and director Michael O’Herlihy decided to change the title. Why they chose to change it to something that sounds like a musical or a 60s spy movie, I couldn’t tell you. It certainly suggests an energy level that’s totally misaligned with the movie itself.

Paul St. Pierre was a Canadian writer and journalist who specialized in tales of British Columbia. At the time Smith! was released in 1969, he was also a Member of Parliament representing Coast Chilcotin. His political career was short-lived, however. After losing his re-election bid in 1972, he returned to writing and continued to be a popular columnist for the Vancouver Sun for many years.

A number of St. Pierre’s stories revolved around a rancher named Smith (no first name, just Smith) and his friendship with an Indian called Ol’ Antoine. St. Pierre himself had already brought Smith to the screen on the short-lived Canadian TV series Cariboo Country. David Hughes, who would later go on to appear on the Disney-adjacent Anne Of Green Gables, starred as Smith and Chief Dan George played Ol’ Antoine, a role he’d reprise in Smith! Cariboo Country was the Indigenous actor’s screen debut at the age of 65. The year after Smith! hit theatres, he’d be nominated for an Oscar thanks to his role in Little Big Man. We’ll see him again in this column.

Disney tapped screen legend Glenn Ford to star as Smith, his first and only gig for the studio. Ford wasn’t quite as big a star as he’d been at his 1950s peak. He’d started the 60s with a couple of expensive flops like Cimarron and The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse. But he made a bit of a comeback with Frank Capra’s 1961 comedy Pocketful Of Miracles, on which he was also an associate producer. Ford’s genial, everyman charm is a good fit for Disney, so it’s kind of strange that he only made one picture at the studio.

As the movie opens, Smith is returning home after spending a few days rounding up some wayward cattle. His wife, Norah (Nancy Olson from Pollyanna and the Flubber saga), and son, Alpie (Christopher Shea, best known as the original voice of Linus in A Charlie Brown Christmas and other Peanuts specials), have some troubling news for Smith (everybody calls him Smith, even his son). An Indian named Gabriel Jimmyboy (Colombian actor Frank Ramírez) has been accused of murdering a white man in a bar fight. Norah suspects that Ol’ Antoine has brought Gabriel to their land and is hiding out with him in an old shack near the edge of their property.

On his way out to the shack, Smith runs into sheriff’s deputy Vince Heber (Keenan Wynn, playing a rather more serious villain than Flubber’s Alonzo P. Hawk). Vince wants to go over Smith’s place with a pair of bloodhounds but Smith puts him off by demanding he get a warrant first. Smith faces Gabriel Jimmyboy unarmed and tries to persuade him to turn himself in, confident that a jury will find he acted in justifiable self-defense. Both Gabriel and Ol’ Antoine scoff at Smith’s naïve belief that an Indian could ever receive a fair trial from an all-white jury.

But it isn’t only the whites who are interested in Gabriel Jimmyboy. The police have offered a $500 reward to anyone who can bring him in. The scent of money attracts the attention of fast-talking sleazeball and part-time translator Walter Charlie (played by the great Warren Oates, who might not be the last person I expected to pop up in a Disney movie but he’s close). Walter Charlie offers to split the money with Smith but, needless to say, Smith can’t be bought.

Smith encourages Ol’ Antoine to turn in Gabriel and use the reward to hire a decent lawyer. Ol’ Antoine does collect the cash but Walter Charlie intercepts him and convinces him to buy a used convertible for $499.95 instead. As a result, Gabriel is stuck with an inexperienced public defender (Roger Ewing) who can barely communicate with his client.

At last, Gabriel Jimmyboy gets his day in court (Oscar winner Dean Jagger appears as the judge, another one-and-done Disney appearance). Everyone eagerly awaits the testimony of Ol’ Antoine with Smith serving as translator. But instead of saying anything at all about the night in question, Ol’ Antoine launches into a lengthy monologue about Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce War, concluding with his famous quote, “I will fight no more forever.”

It’s stirring stuff and evidently has the intended effect, as the case is soon dismissed. The only person who seems less than thrilled by this decision is our old pal Vince Heber. But instead of limiting his comments to the fact that Ol’ Antoine’s testimony seems irrelevant at best (you know you’ve made a misstep when your audience starts thinking, “Y’know, that horrible racist kind of has a point.”), he goes off on an anti-Indian tirade. Smith blows his top and decks him in open court.

The judge slaps Smith with a $50 fine and 30 days in jail. Now how will Smith get his hay crop in?! With Smith locked up, Ol’ Antoine stages a sit-in on the courthouse steps. Gabriel’s useless public defender finally decides to do something and sticks up for Smith, somehow managing to get the judge to reconsider. Finally, Smith gets out of jail and returns to the ranch where all the Indians have gathered to help with the hay and to fulfill Ol’ Antoine’s long-delayed promise to break little Alpie’s horse. You see? St. Pierre’s original title turned out to have something to do with the story after all!

Three sheet movie poster for Smith

Obviously this isn’t the first time Disney has tried to deal with Indigenous peoples in a sympathetic light. But after such well-intentioned but deeply flawed efforts like The Light In The Forest and Tonka, you can understand why I approached Smith! with some trepidation. The good news is that there’s not much here that’s overtly cringe-worthy. Sure, it’s a little hard to swallow Warren Oates as a Native American but they’re getting better in terms of representation. In addition to Chief Dan George, the cast also includes Jay Silverheels, perhaps one of the best-known Indigenous actors of his generation thanks to his lengthy tenure as Tonto opposite Clayton Moore’s Lone Ranger. Hey, at least they’re trying, which is more than they were doing ten years earlier.

The problem with Smith! (well, one of the problems…there are a few) is I have no idea who this movie was even made for. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a subdued, methodical approach but if this movie was any more low-key, it would fade off the screen altogether. The story’s inciting incident, Gabriel Johnnyboy’s fight with Sam Hardy, takes place before the movie even starts and we never get a really clear idea of just what went down. It’s tough to care about the outcome of a courtroom drama when you’re not given enough information to decide how you feel about the accused.

The fact that Smith! does eventually morph into a courtroom drama is a sign that O’Herlihy, Anderson and Pelletier were aiming at a somewhat older audience. Studios don’t tend to make a lot of courtroom dramas for the 10-and-under crowd. But they never fully commit to making a movie for grownups, either. Every so often, as if by royal decree, the movie checks in with Alpie and his Native American buddy, Peterpaul (Ricky Cordell). These scenes do nothing to advance the narrative. They exist solely to cater to junior Disney fans who would otherwise have absolutely nothing else to relate to.

Not that older audiences fare much better. Smith! is a contemporary western only in the sense that it takes place in the west, it’s about Native Americans and we see a few horses. There’s no action to speak of, no tense showdowns, no magnificent landscapes. The “posse” in pursuit of Gabriel Jimmyboy consists of two guys and two dogs and they end up tracking Gabriel straight back to the police station where the fugitive has already turned himself in. My, what a thrilling chase.

One of Smith!’s biggest miscalculations is Smith’s wife, Norah. In her previous Disney outings, Nancy Olson was a charming and funny presence opposite stars like Fred MacMurray and Hayley Mills. Here, Louis Pelletier’s script turns her into an unlikable harridan, eternally annoyed by her husband and practically tearing her hair out over the stress of their money woes. She’s also not a fan of Smith’s friendship with the Natives. She declares early on, “I’m so fed up with Indians!” Not a great look, Norah.

Weirdly, the movie Smith! reminded me of most was Tom Laughlin’s 1971 hit Billy Jack. Both movies attempt to reform the traditional screen image of Native Americans and both get very, very confused along the way. Try to imagine a G-rated version of Billy Jack with almost no violence and you’d end up with something like Smith! You’d also end up with a movie that most people aren’t going to want to see.

Adding to the Billy Jack feel is the title song, “The Ballad of Smith and Gabriel Jimmyboy”, written and performed by Bobby Russell. Russell was a singer-songwriter in the country-folk-pop arena who had some minor hits as a solo artist. But his best-known songs were recorded by other artists. Roger Miller (who will appear in this column eventually) had a crossover hit with “Little Green Apples”. And in 1973, Russell’s then-wife Vicki Lawrence went all the way to number one with “The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia”.

(Vicki Lawrence would go on to do a voice in the DTV sequel The Fox And The Hound 2 and appear on multiple episodes of Hannah Montana but strangely never appeared in anything that qualifies for this column. That’s crazy to me. If anybody seems like they should have been in a live-action Disney comedy of the 70s, it’s Vicki Lawrence.)

Smith! was released to theatres on May 9, 1969, to general indifference. It would be the last Disney assignment for director Michael O’Herlihy, whose work for the studio represented his only theatrical feature films. O’Herlihy went back to TV after Smith! and never looked back. His last credit was a 1988 episode of Hunter. He passed away back home in Ireland at the age of 69 in 1997.

There’s one other person worth mentioning who was allegedly involved in the production of Smith! According to IMDb, a young Melanie Griffith made her screen debut as an extra in the film. I don’t know that I necessarily believe that. Griffith would have been around 11 years old at the time. Her parents were Tippi Hedren and former actor turned advertising executive Peter Griffith. Her stepfather was agent Noel Marshall (the family would later make the notorious Roar, which is kind of like a Disney nature movie on acid). So it’s certainly possible that Melanie was already going out for small parts in things like Smith! But no one in her family had any particular connection to Disney and Melanie wouldn’t appear on screen again until 1973’s The Harrad Experiment. At any rate, I certainly didn’t spot Melanie Griffith in Smith! and she won’t be returning to this column. Her next brush with Disney came after the formation of Touchstone Pictures.

Smith! is one of the lesser lights in the Disney back catalog. It isn’t currently available on Disney+ and I don’t expect that to change any time soon. Believe it or not, I always hope that these more obscure titles turn out to be hidden gems worthy of rediscovery. Instead, Smith! is one of those movies that makes a project like this a bit of a slog.

VERDICT!: Disney! Minus!

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Son Of Flubber

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Son Of Flubber

Son Of Flubber was Walt Disney’s first sequel, with an asterisk. Nearly twenty years earlier, he released The Three Caballeros in response to the tremendous response to Saludos Amigos. Caballeros is every inch a follow-up to Amigos but since neither of those movies follow a narrative framework, they don’t entirely count. The same could be said of Melody Time, a spiritual sequel to Make Mine Music. Then there’s Davy Crockett And The River Pirates. It’s obviously a sequel (well, prequel) to Davy Crockett, King Of The Wild Frontier. But they were originally produced for TV, not the big screen. So sure, if you take all of those sequels-but-not-really out of the equation, Son Of Flubber was first.

That’s certainly a distinction Walt himself would have made. He had explicitly stated in interviews that he didn’t like sequels. He didn’t seem to have any compunction about going back to the same well and trying to make something the same but different. But sequels, especially in those days, weren’t supposed to offer anything but more of the same. If that’s what Walt Disney’s definition of a sequel was, he absolutely delivered on it with Son Of Flubber.

The gang’s all here from The Absent-Minded Professor. Everyone from director Robert Stevenson and screenwriter Bill Walsh on down to Fred MacMurray and Charlie the dog returned for part two. The movie picks up almost exactly where the first one left off. Professor Brainard (MacMurray) and his new assistant, Biff Hawk (Tommy Kirk), are flying the Model T down to Washington hoping to collect some of that sweet, sweet government money they’ve been promised. Unfortunately, that’s going to take some time. The Secretary of Defense (Edward Andrews) explains the labyrinth of red tape that must be navigated in order to maximize their eventual pay-out. Why settle for less when you could get more? So Brainard and Biff are forced to return to Medfield College empty-handed, except for vague promises that it’ll all be worth it someday.

As always, the financially strapped Medfield needs the money now. The college has made plans for an elaborate new science center, Flubber Hall. When Biff’s father, Alonzo P. Hawk (Keenan Wynn), discovers that Brainard didn’t get the money, he gleefully announces plans to bulldoze the entire campus on the first of the month unless his loan is repaid.

Meanwhile, Brainerd is having some domestic troubles with his new bride, Betsy (Nancy Olson). She’s being courted by some Madison Avenue types (led by comedian Ken Murray) who want to buy the rights to Flubber. They dazzle her with the promise of furs, pearls and a million dollar check and come armed with sample commercials for such products as Flubberoleum, a revolutionary bouncy floor guaranteed to change the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Suburban America. But once Brainard admits that his government contract prevents him from selling Flubber to anyone else, the ad men pack up and leave.

As they walk out, a man from the government (Bob Sweeney, last seen in Moon Pilot) walks in. However, the agency this government man represents is the IRS, not the Defense Department. He’s here to collect the tax on the prospective earnings reported by Brainard based on the millions he’s been promised. The fact that he hasn’t actually received any of that money yet doesn’t matter. When Brainerd tells the heartless taxman that he’d probably put his own mother in jail, Mr. Harker assures him that he already has for unreported income on her homemade jams and jellies.

In desperate need of money (and refusing to let Betsy go back to work as a secretary for his once-and-future rival, English professor Shelby Aston, again played by Elliott Reid), Brainerd gets back to work on his latest invention. Flubbergas appears to have several interesting properties but Brainerd hopes it will allow mankind to control the weather. A successful experiment made it rain inside from the steam off a boiling tea kettle. But when he tries to go bigger by aiming it at a distant cloud, it doesn’t appear to work. It does, however, shatter every last piece of glass within its reach, unbeknownst to Brainerd.

Biff, in the meantime, is working on an alternative use for Flubbergas. With his pal Humphrey (Leon Tyler, one of the basketball players from the first film) acting as guinea pig, Biff tries to create an inflatable football uniform that allows the player himself to be thrown into the end zone. His experiments aren’t entirely successful, unless his goal was to repeatedly destroy the chicken coop owned by Brainerd’s neighbor, milkman Mr. Hummel (played by Preston Sturges regular William Demarest, a couple of years before he joined the cast of MacMurray’s sitcom My Three Sons as Uncle Charley).

MEANWHILE meanwhile, Shelby Aston is up to his old tricks, trying to steal Betsy away from Brainard, and this time he’s brought a secret weapon. He invites Brainard’s old girlfriend, sexpot Desiree de la Roche (Joanna Moore), over to dinner at the Brainards. Betsy eventually becomes convinced that Desiree and Brainard have rekindled their old affair, so she leaves him, temporarily moving in with her old boss, Medfield College President Rufus Daggett (Leon Ames) and his wife (Harriet MacGibbon).

As for all that broken glass, Alonzo Hawk’s insurance company has been left holding the bag for thousands of dollars in claims. He figures out that the whole thing started at Brainard’s house and proposes another crooked deal, using the Flubbergas in service of an elaborate insurance scam. Brainard refuses, of course, and Hawk threatens to bring the full force of the law down on him.

Despondent over all these setbacks, Brainard agrees to help Biff out with his project. This time, the inflatable football uniform works and Medfield trounces rival Rutland College in essentially a replay of the first film’s basketball game. Brainard has no time to savor the victory, however. Hawk makes good on his threat and the police arrive to haul Brainard off to jail.

Brainard looks to be in a tight spot until Buzz turns up at his trial with a surprise witness. It’s none other than Ed Wynn, one of the only actors from the original Absent-Minded Professor who does not reprise the same role here. Now he’s the Chief Agricultural Officer and he presents evidence that Brainard’s invention does work, just not in the way he intended. The Flubbergas has somehow supercharged the atmosphere, turning Medfield’s formerly barren farmland lush and verdant, producing giant-sized fruits and vegetables. Wynn dubs the phenomenon “dry rain”. Brainard is once again a hero and the case is dismissed, despite overwhelming evidence that he was clearly guilty of the charges he faced.

Son Of Flubber theatrical poster

Believe it or not, I did not have high expectations going into Son Of Flubber. The Absent-Minded Professor is a fun little movie but there’s nothing about it that left me saying, “More of these characters, please.” But here’s the thing. Son Of Flubber is actually a surprisingly good, funny sequel. That is, right up to the point where, all of a sudden, it isn’t.

The first several scenes are terrific. Walsh’s screenplay takes aim at government inefficiency and absurd tax laws and lands quite a few hits. Disney had previously lobbed some softballs at Uncle Sam in Moon Pilot but the jokes here are funnier and fresher. The sequence with the ad men pitching their ludicrous products is even better. The sight of a typical suburban dad bouncing his baby off a Flubberized floor will never not be funny. This is all good stuff suggesting we’re about to get a smarter, more satirical movie than is actually coming.

The trouble starts when Walsh and Stevenson decide to refocus on Brainard’s latest experiment. From here, they seem content to simply deliver a rehash of the first film. The football game apes the rhythms and gags of the basketball game down to the second. Even Paul Lynde, making his film debut as the game’s color commentator, can’t liven things up. Once again, Brainard flies his Model T over Shelby’s car and once again, Shelby crashes into James Westerfield and Forrest Lewis, the cops from The Absent-Minded Professor and The Shaggy Dog. This time, Brainard floods Shelby’s car with rain, which is admittedly kind of a cool effect. But the punchline to the gag is the same.

The movie’s biggest problem is its focus on Brainard and Betsy’s marital problems. Try to set aside the fact that they’re completely rooted in retrograde stereotypes. Brainard’s “no wife of mine is going to work” attitude will have modern women rolling their eyes, while modern men will (hopefully) be equally insulted by Brainard’s total inability to even feed himself without his wife. No one ever accused Disney of having progressive views on marriage.

The bigger issue is that we’ve seen all this before. The triangle between Brainard, Betsy and Shelby was already one of the weakest elements in the first film. Bringing Desiree into the mix does nothing to change that. We already know that Betsy’s willing to put up with a lot from her husband. The guy left her standing at the altar three times, for crying out loud. She ought to be smart enough to see through Shelby’s transparent attempt to wreck her marriage.

The Brainards’ marital woes are endemic of the film’s tendency to repeat itself. A love triangle was part of the first movie, so it needs to be part of the new one whether or not it makes any sense for the story or the characters. It’s also one subplot too many in a movie that’s already overstuffed with dangling plot threads. The business with the taxman is smart and funny but it’s forgotten the second Bob Sweeney leaves the picture. The same goes for the ad men and the brass down in Washington.

None of that seemed to matter much to critics and audiences in 1963. Most critics agreed that even though Son Of Flubber wasn’t as fresh and original as The Absent-Minded Professor, it still breezed by on its light, buoyant tone. Audiences turned out in droves. The movie premiered in January of 1963 and went on to become the sixth highest-grossing movie of the year, behind much bigger movies like Cleopatra, How The West Was Won, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Tom Jones and Irma la Douce. It was a bright spot in an otherwise so-so year for the studio.

I can’t end this entry without discussing the Great Flubber Fiasco of 1962-63. In the autumn of 1962, Disney teamed up with toy company Hassenfield Brothers (who would shorten their name to Hasbro by the end of the decade) to mass produce Flubber, a bouncy, stretchy glob that was more or less the same as Silly Putty.

Flubber - the Toy

Kids loved Flubber but shortly after the release of the film it was meant to promote, reports started to surface of an outbreak of skin rashes in schools nationwide. Flubber appeared to be the cause and, while nobody at Hassenfield Brothers or Disney ever stepped up to claim responsibility, the bad press was enough to doom the product. By May, Hassenfield decided to yank Flubber off the market.

This is where it gets really fun. Hassenfield Brothers now had a whole lot of potentially toxic Flubber and no idea how to get rid of it. Landfills flat out refused to accept it. Burning it produced a thick, greasy black smoke that stank up the vicinity for miles. They tried to sink it in a lake but the Flubber balls just floated right back up to the surface.

Finally, Hassenfield Bros. just did as Atari would do years later with their unwanted E.T. video game cartridges. They dug a big pit, buried the Flubber and built an employee parking lot on top of it. And supposedly, that’s where Flubber is to this day, buried beneath Delta Drive in Pawtucket, RI. Some say that on hot days, the Flubber bubbles up through cracks in the asphalt. That, along with some of the other details of the story, might be a bit of an exaggeration. But this is the kind of story where it’s more fun to print the legend.

For the time being anyway, Walt Disney was through with Flubber. The studio wouldn’t touch the stuff again until the 1988 TV remake of The Absent-Minded Professor. But we have not seen the last of Medfield College, Alonzo P. Hawk, or most of the film’s cast and crew. Almost everybody will be back in this column sooner or later. Those Disney contracts must have been written on Flubber. People keep bouncing back for more.

VERDICT: The first half is a Disney Plus but the second is a Disney Neutral at best.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Absent-Minded Professor

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The Absent-Minded Professor

Walt Disney knew his way around a winning formula. It isn’t as simple as merely giving the people what they want. You do that too often and you run the risk of repeating yourself, which is something Walt tried to avoid at all costs. Instead, you have to create something that’s the same but different. Walt proved he knew how to do this repeatedly, through the many short films of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy, through his animated classics, even through the long-running True-Life Adventures.

When The Shaggy Dog hit it big in 1959, Walt knew he had another winning formula on his hands. Today, that formula is as familiar to Disney fans as the names of the seven dwarfs. They typically take place in Anytown, USA, usually around some stodgy old institution like a college or museum. A student or inventor will make some improbable discovery, either scientific or paranormal, and hilarity ensues. In later years, Leonard Maltin would dub them “gimmick comedies”.

The Absent-Minded Professor cements the formula begun by The Shaggy Dog. This time, the source material was an obscure 1922 short story called A Situation Of Gravity by Samuel W. Taylor. Taylor (no relation to Samuel A. Taylor, the screenwriter of Vertigo) wrote a couple of screenplays, including Hugo Haas’s 1954 film noir Bait, but was better known, at least among the LDS community, for a series of Mormon-themed historical novels. His book Heaven Knows Why! is considered a classic of Mormon comedic writing, which is apparently a thing.

Taylor’s story is hard to track down, so I have no idea how much of it remains in Bill Walsh’s screenplay adaptation. If I had to guess, I’d say not much at all. Walsh had become one of Disney’s most reliable live-action writer/producers since transitioning from TV to features. He’d written The Littlest Outlaw, The Shaggy Dog and Toby Tyler so far. He’ll continue to be a major presence in this column.

Also returning from The Shaggy Dog was Fred MacMurray. But this time, MacMurray wasn’t a put-upon family man whose eldest son experimented with wacky experiments. Here, he’s Professor Ned Brainard, a confirmed bachelor whose obsession with his own wacky experiments keeps causing him to forget about his own wedding. Most women left standing at the altar would dump their fiancé after the first time. But Betsy Carlisle (Nancy Olson, last seen in Pollyanna) either has the patience of a saint or is a glutton for punishment. She’s given him one last chance (his third!) to tie the knot.

Unfortunately, Brainard stumbles on to a discovery that causes his garage lab to explode and knocks him out cold. He misses the wedding but upon coming to, finds he’s accidentally created a Silly Putty-like goo that gains energy and momentum every time it hits a hard surface. He excitedly dubs the stuff flubber (for “flying rubber”) and is confident that his discovery will save both his relationship with Betsy and his job at financially strapped Medfield College.

Betsy works as a secretary to the dean (Leon Ames, who will also be back in this column), so Brainard attempts to kill two birds with one stone by introducing them both to flubber at the same time. They couldn’t possibly care less. The dean has bigger problems since the massive loan he took out from ruthless tycoon Alonzo Hawk (Keenan Wynn, another soon-to-be familiar face) is now due. Hawk also has a personal grudge against Brainard. The prof flunked his son Biff (Tommy Kirk, playing slightly against type as a dumb jock), preventing him from playing in the all-important basketball game against Medfield’s rivals.

To make matters worse, Peggy has finally decided to dump Brainard. Her escort to the game is English professor Shelby Ashton (Elliott Reid and yep, he’ll be back in this column too). Deciding he needs a more impressive demonstration, Brainard rigs up his old Model T with flubber and some garden variety radioactive isotopes he had lying around the house, creating the world’s first flying car. When Peggy refuses to go for a ride with him, he irons some flubber onto the team’s tennis shoes at halftime, resulting in a bouncy win for Medfield.

Even so, nobody will listen to Brainard about flubber. So he decides to call Washington, where various bureaucrats give him the runaround. The Secretary of Defense (Edward Andrews) is equally dismissive but the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force all overhear his conversation. For some reason, they take him very seriously and immediately head to Medfield to check it out for themselves.

Unfortunately, Alonzo Hawk happened to spot Brainard’s Model T flying across the night sky. He and Biff hatch a scheme to switch cars, leaving Brainard with egg on his face when he attempts to give the military men a demonstration. But Peggy gets a firsthand look at flubber in action at a dance with Brainard wearing flubberized shoes. She goes back to him and they launch their own scheme to get the Model T back.

Comic book adaptation of The Absent-Minded Professor

If The Shaggy Dog invented the gimmick comedy formula, The Absent-Minded Professor perfects it. Everything that worked in the previous film is back in some form or another. There are elaborate special effects sequences that go for laughs rather than action, suspense or visual opulence. The decision to film in black-and-white was made to help mask those effects, since Walt, Bill Walsh and director Robert Stevenson weren’t sure if they’d hold up in color. They aren’t exactly seamless but they are effective. The basketball game and the Model T bouncing off the roof of another car and driving on walls could have come straight out of one of Walt’s cartoons.

MacMurray was a lot of fun in The Shaggy Dog but he really hits his stride here. The Shaggy Dog had given him an essentially reactive role. He excelled in it because Fred MacMurray always had been a great straight man. But he’s the driving force behind The Absent-Minded Professor and he’s just as good. He gets in some great physical comedy (before the visual effects and stunt guys take over) but he’s a master at the half-muttered mostly gibberish dialogue he rattles off constantly. Walt got very lucky when Fred MacMurray joined the studio. He’d found a comedic leading man who could do it all.

The Absent-Minded Professor also introduces the concept of cameos and callbacks to the gimmick comedy formula. James Westerfield and Forrest Lewis are back as put-upon traffic cops Hanson and Kelly from The Shaggy Dog, still crashing into cars and splashing hot coffee into Hanson’s face. When the fire department turns up to try and stop Mr. Hawk from bouncing into the stratosphere, they’re led by Keenan Wynn’s father, Ed Wynn (last heard from in this column as the Mad Hatter in Alice In Wonderland). This is actually a reference on top of a reference. In addition to the unremarked upon father-and-son casting, the elder Wynn had become a star on the radio playing the title character on The Fire Chief. These little touches of meta humor and winks to a shared universe would become a common trope in Disney comedies.

There are two more names in the credits who will soon become inextricably connected to Walt Disney. Brothers Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman began writing songs together in the early 1950s. They’d had a few hit songs, including “You’re Sixteen” and “Tall Paul”, which become Mouseketeer Annette Funicello’s highest-charting single. Annette recorded several other Sherman Brothers tunes and this caught the ear of Walt Disney.

Walt hired the brothers as full-time staff songwriters in 1960. Their first assignment was another song for Annette, “Strummin’ Song”, which was featured in the two-part Disneyland episode The Horsemasters. The Absent-Minded Professor’s “Medfield Fight Song” was their first credit in a Disney feature. It will not be their last. The Sherman Brothers will be back in this column many times. They also wrote “The Flubber Song”, a ridiculous novelty song for Fred MacMurray that doesn’t show up in the movie but did make it onto the record.

The Absent-Minded Professor record album

The Absent-Minded Professor premiered on March 16, 1961. It became the studio’s second consecutive hit of the year after the success of One Hundred And One Dalmatians, raking in over $11 million. It was the 5th highest-grossing picture of 1961 and the studio wasn’t done yet. The year’s 4th highest-grossing movie will be in this column next time.

The movie also provided Walt a somewhat unlikely return to the Academy Awards. The Absent-Minded Professor was nominated for three Oscars: Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration (both in the black-and-white categories) and Best Special Effects. It lost the black-and-white categories to The Hustler and The Guns Of Navarone took home the special effects award. Still, the idea that The Absent-Minded Professor was up against the likes of La Dolce Vita and Judgment At Nuremberg is pretty wild.

The legacy of The Absent-Minded Professor is very much alive and not just at Disney. Special effects comedies were rare before Walt Disney came along. Abbott and Costello had met the monsters but they weren’t playing with the kinds of budgets that Walt was able to lavish on his productions. The success of the gimmick comedies helped pave the way for later blockbusters like Ghostbusters and Men In Black. Like Professor Ned Brainard, Walt Disney had created an extremely successful formula. Flubber will return.

VERDICT: Disney Plus

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