Locomotive Laugh

Son of Flubber. Ladies and gentlemen, a deathly silence has fallen on the stadium now. Only eight seconds left in the last period, and dear old Medfield, trailing 37-35, has the ball on its own two-yard line, first down and 98 to go. The team comes out of the huddle, up to the line of--WHAT! They're trying a field goal! Are they nuts! Ha-Ha-Ha! Who ever heard of a 98-yard field goal! Ha! ha! --huh? The ball is sailing over the line of scrimmage, over the fifty-yard line, over the goal posts, over the state line, over the Atlantic Ocean . . . Ladies and gentlemen, the ball is in orbit!

Well, that's one way to give the customers a kick. But there are others, and Walt Disney exploits almost all of them in this insuperably sappy sequel to The Absent Minded Professor. Remember him? His name is Neddie the Nut (Fred MacMurray) and he teaches chemistry at Medfield College. One day he blows up his lab and in the debris discovers flubber--the word means flying rubber, and the substance it describes repeals the law of gravity. In Son of Flubber he turns flubber slubber into flubbergas and shoots it through Big Flubbertha (a plastic howitzer that looks as if it cost at least 39,000 bubble-gum wrappers) at a passing cloud. He wants to make rain but he only breaks windows--20,000 windows.

Enter the villain (Keenan Wynn), a mustached miscreant named Alonzo Hawk who proposes a dastardly scheme to get rich quick: buy stock in glass companies, and then--heh-heh-heh--break every window in the world! But the professor proudly refuses, and jumps in his flivver. He doesn't want to miss The Big Game--and neither will any moviegoer who needs a good, old-fashioned locomotive laugh. It's a flubbergasser.

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