Pop Focus: The Absent-Minded Professor

Here's a trove of promo stills from the 1961 Disney/Fred MacMurray vehicle, "The Absent-Minded Professor."

It's a film that still holds up quite well, I think. I know my kids enjoyed it quite a bit when we went on a family jag through Disney's 1950s and 1960s live-action flicks a few years back.

The movie spawned a sequel, "Son of Flubber," named after the "flying rubber" substance MacMurray's character Professor Brainard discovers in this first film.

"The Absent-Minded Professor" can also be seen as the first of Disney's Medfield/Midvale comedies including "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes," "The Strongest Man in the World," "The Misadventures of Merlin Jones," and "The Monkey's Uncle," all of which were set in small college towns and carried the theme of science gone humorously awry.





















Pop Culture Safari: Jungle cruise; Rockford Files; Jack Kirby; Tintin

Print out your own map of Disneyland's Jungle Cruise.

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Download Jim Rockford's answering machine messages as MP3s.

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Neal Kirby talks about his dad, Jack, co-creating Marvel's Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.



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Lancaster University in England has appointed a Tintin professor.
Peeters, author of a biography of Tintin’s creator HergĂ© and other titles about the quiffed Belgian adventurer, will take up his three-year post as visiting professor in graphic fiction and comic art next summer. He will, said Lancaster, be delivering a series of lectures, running creative writing workshops and supervising post-graduate students. The university described his appointment to what it said was the first such position in the UK as “significant”, adding that it demonstrates its “full academic commitment to placing comic book art not just in its creative writing and literature department, but also across its wider disciplines, including philosophy”.

New Music Friday: Star Wars Christmas Album; Bjork; Love; Jaco Soundtrack; Flaming Lips; John Barry, more

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