He has even left his fiancée (Marcia Gay Harden) standing at the marriage altar, not once but twice, while he forgot about the wedding ceremonies. The Professor's mania for his work is so great that nothing else can compete. He even uses the nude male and female models as examples while he describes the force of gravity! He's so blissfully unaware of the world around him that at one point he walks into a classroom-a classroom filled with art students busy drawing nude models-to deliver a lecture and not until he's well into the lecture does he realize he's in the wrong room. This approach nicely dovetails into the character of the Professor, who is so absent-minded that his own energy rarely gets funneled in the right direction. Williams and flubber actually end up complementing each other: while he slightly underplays his character, the flubber works like the repressed part of his personality. The flubber works like an extension of his personality: it vibrates and pulsates, ready to take off in twenty different directions at the same time. Even while playing an habitually-dazed character like Professor Phillip Brainard, Williams is a ball of energy waiting to explode. Maybe no other actor could have survived the competition with the special effects and the butt-shaking flubber, but Williams is no ordinary actor. And thanks to Robin Williams, the Professor doesn't get steam-rolled over in the rush to create a new lovable creature for the Disney stable. It's easy to get cynical about Flubber and disparage the movie for its pre-fabricated commercial appeal, but at the heart of the movie is still the Professor. A cute little critter is a lot easier to sell to prospective moviegoers than a real, live human character. It's easy to imagine Disney executives sitting around a conference table, throwing out ideas about how to create marketable toys for Flubber. Now little blobs of flubber can dance the mambo and give us Busby Berkeley-like dance extravaganzas where they spin geometric patterns while shaking their little green booties. As the title change indicates, much of the emphasis has been shifted from the Professor to his creation.
Pay attention to that name change, for while in the original movie "flubber" had no character, in this new version, flubber is a precocious little gremlin-like creation that twirls, bounces, and twitters.
Disney's Flubber began life as a remake of The Absent-Minded Professor (the 1961 Disney classic starring Fred MacMurray), but somewhere along the way, the title was changed to Flubber.
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