Flubber

Flubber was Disney remaking one of its own hits. In The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), Fred MacMurray plays a Medfield College professor who invents a substance that picks up energy every time it hits something hard, and names it flubber, a mash-up of "flying rubber." That film, drawn from a 1943 Liberty magazine short story by Samuel W. Taylor, did well enough that Son of Flubber (1963) became the first sequel in Disney's history. For the 1997 version John Hughes rewrote Bill Walsh's original screenplay (Walsh, who died in 1975, got a posthumous credit), Hughes co-produced, and Les Mayfield directed.

Robin Williams plays Professor Philip Brainard, so lost in his research that he has already missed two of his own weddings to Sara Jean Reynolds (Marcia Gay Harden), the college president. He misses the third because his experiment has just produced a sentient green goo. His robot assistant Weebo (voiced by Jodi Benson), who is secretly in love with him, files it as "flying rubber," and flubber takes over the film: it knocks out a pair of henchmen sent by the college's rich sponsor, makes Brainard's vintage Ford Thunderbird fly, and lets Medfield's hopeless basketball team outjump rival Rutland. The flying car and the basketball game both come from the 1961 film, where the car was a Model T. At one point Weebo lets the flubber out just to dance around the house. Nancy Olson, who played Betsy Carlisle in both of the originals, appears uncredited as a secretary at Ford.

Critics were not kind. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus says the film "squanders the immense talent of its cast and crew" with its "overactive focus on special effects and tiresome slapstick," though Williams himself drew some praise. Audiences didn't care. Flubber opened on November 26, 1997, topped the box office over the five-day Thanksgiving holiday with $36.4 million, stayed number one the next weekend, and finished with $93 million in the U.S. and Canada and $178 million worldwide. Danny Elfman wrote the score, and the movie came out on VHS in April 1998.