The Absent-Minded Professor has immense charm. It even has a wonderfully absurd visual poetry in its scenes of a Model T performing aerobic loops in mid-air and (literally) driving off into the sunset at the end. The scenes with a basketball team madly leaping over the heads of their opponents or the attempts to stop an uncontrollably bouncing Keenan Wynn have a genuinely madcap inventivity about them. There are many of the typical inanities of Disney live-action comedy – slapstick car chases, buffoonish authority figures – but in this, the film that set that formula, it is welded into a charming and effortless whole.

The effects work is excellent – the only effects that do not work are the plainly cartoon-animated bouncing balls of flubber. Nancy Olson gives a bland, forgettable performance but burly, baritone Keenan Wynn displays a great deal of energy as Alonzo Hawk. Fred MacMurray’s understated deadpan performance, inspiredly hopping about on out-of-control legs like a manic chimpanzee, is one of great comic invention. Even the script is reasonably believable, the technical explanation for flubber having a surface plausibility that at least seems more conceivable than the usual gobbledygook inserted in lieu in science-fiction films. (Unfortunately, it is done in by one glaring error – that flubber would fail through the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that increased action creates a gradual loss, as opposed to increase, of energy as the film claims).

The Absent-Minded Professor became the template for a series of Disney madcap (as opposed to mad) scientist films through the 1960s. (Indeed, you could argue that The Absent-Minded Professor was the single film that rescued the scientist’s reputation and transformed him into a lovable eccentric rather than the madman defying the laws of nature as he was constantly being portrayed in the 1930s and 40s). Other Disney imitators include the Merlin Jones films – The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (1963) and The Monkey’s Uncle (1965) – and the Dexter Reilly films – The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969), Now You See Him, Now You Don’t (1972) and The Strongest Man in the World (1975). Medfield College became a regular venue in Disney’s live-action comedies and Keenan Wynn played Alonzo Hawk again in Son of Flubber (1963) and Herbie Rides Again (1974).

Disney made a disappointing sequel – Son of Flubber (1963), which also featured all the principals here. There have been two mediocre remakes – the tv movie The Absent-Minded Professor (1994), starring Harry Andrews in the title role, and the cinematically released Flubber (1997) with Robin Williams.