The film picks up where its predecessor left off, and more than a dozen cast members (and much of the crew) returned for the sequel. The script makes the assumption that the audience has seen The Absent Minded Professor; others will be completely confused, though perhaps less bored. Egghead inventor Professor Ned Brainard (Fred MacMurray) is now married to Betsy (Nancy Olson), but the millions the couple expected from Ned's great invention, flubber, has been mired in Pentagon red tape. This puts a great financial strain on the new couple's lives but Ned, undaunted, simply decides to make a new invention, this time a rainmaking machine using "flubbergas."

Ned's invention is only partly successful. He can make little storm clouds in his kitchen, which leads to a funny if unexpectedly crude double-entendre involving a puddle of Ned's "rain." However, on a larger scale things go awry, the invention shattering glass throughout the city. Insurance tycoon Alonzo P. Hawk (Keenan Wynn), now faced with having to pay out tens of thousands of dollars to replace all the broken glass, threatens to have Ned thrown in prison. Meanwhile, Hawk's son Biff (Tommy Kirk), also Ned's assistant, conspires to use flubberglass in Medfield U's big football game against Rutland.

The film's script is spectacularly unimaginative. While it's nice to catch up with the familiar characters, the story is practically a remake of the first picture, with whole sequences reworked for the sequel. A flubber-filled basketball game becomes a football match here. (As before, our heroes cheat to win the game, hardly a positive message to instill in Flubber's impressionable audience.) A highlight of the first film was a long sequence where Ned, having converted his Model-T into a flying car thanks to flubber, gleefully torments romantic rival Shelby (Elliott Reid) by swooping over the latter's car. This scene is repeated in Son of Flubber, even to the point of bringing back beleaguered police officer Hanson (James Westerfield).

None of this is done with the grace or freshness of the first film, though director Robert Stevenson and Disney's optical and on-set effects people do pull off a few amusing gags. (Some effects are quite bad, however. In one shot, Officer Hanson is as transparent as the Bert I. Gordon's Amazing Colossal Man.) At 100 minutes the film is much too long, and subplots concerning Shelby and an old flame of Ned's (Joanna Moore) do nothing to move the plot forward and are more irritating than funny.

As before, MacMurray brings enormous charm to his character, a man of unflappable enthusiasm with genuine love of science. As seemed to be the case with all Disney films from the early-1960s until about 1980, Son of Flubber is stacked with several dozen genial character actors many of whom, like MacMurray, became almost like a stock company for Disney: Keenan Wynn (who reprised his character in the otherwise unrelated Herbie Rides Again), his father Ed Wynn, Charlie Ruggles, Leon Ames, William Demarest, Paul Lynde, Edward Andrews. Joe Flynn, another frequent Disney player, appears unbilled, as do Harvey Korman and J. Pat O'Malley. Leon Tyler, who plays a substantial and pivotal role in the story as Biff's hapless friend Humphrey, is himself unbilled, quite unjustly.

Video & Audio

Son of Flubber looks to have been shot for a 1.75:1 theatrical aspect ratio. It appears that either the source elements were hard-matted, or possibly the decision was made later to reformat the image for TV and home video. Whatever the case, the full frame DVD appears properly framed top-to-bottom, but substantially cropped on the sides. This is most obvious, for instance, when a newspaper headline is shown, and in one shot of a scoreboard where the letters on both sides are cut off. (The opening titles appear to have been slightly squeezed, in an effort to avoid this.)

However, throughout the entire film, ordinary shots are rendered slightly askew with most compositions looking tight and unappealing. Supporting players like Tommy Kirk seem to spend much of their time half in and out of the frame, and though technically not panned-and-scanned the effect is just as annoying.

Beyond the aspect ratio issue, the presentation is still mediocre. The image has a gray, washed-out quality. Some of this is inherent in the film's numerous opticals, but the image is much less sharp, its blacks much less back than one would expect from Disney. Around the 25-minute mark, near the end of a reel, a considerable amount of speckling appears in the center of the image for a few minutes. Almost perversely, the bright, colorful menu screens are 16:9.

The mono sound is functional but not impressive. Hard-of-hearing English subtitles are offered, along with standard subtitles in French and Spanish.

Extras

The only real extra is an okay gallery of behind-the-scene stills, ad art and the like. A "Register Your DVD" option is billed as a bonus feature, but comes off mainly as a marketing tool. It may be a bonus for Disney's sales department when the consumer volunteers their buying habits. Others will be less than thrilled.

Parting Thoughts

Son of Flubber is low-end Disney slapstick. The gags are spread thin and there's far too much repetition to make the film anything more than a rehash. With a decent transfer and a few good extras the DVD might have squeaked by. The transfer all but ruins the presentation, though. No "Pure Digital Magic" here.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. He is presently writing a new book on Japanese cinema for Taschen.