Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Absent-Minded Professor [Book Review]

"The Absent-Minded Professor" is a book written by George R. Sherman. It was published in 1961. This is an extremely obscure book that nobody cares about today... which makes it one of the very books I tend to look for. I also want to say that this book was very old and barely held together. I had to tape the spine up, and a few of the pages had crazy crayon swirls on it, likely made by some child. However all the pages were there, and that's what counts.

This book is a literary adaptation of the Disney movie of the same name, and it's one of those movies that I never get tired of. The story is about Professor Brainard who keeps missing his wedding due to his obsession with science and his own experiments--thus the title of the book. He doesn't mean to miss his wedding, and he does love his fiancé. The problem is simply that he is too easily distracted.

Despite being absent-minded, he is actually very smart. The whole impetus of the story was his creation of a rubbery substance called flubber which creates its own energy. Normally if you bounce a rubber ball, it will bounce lower and lower until it stops entirely. But with flubber, it will actually bounce higher and higher. faster and faster, forever. He even found a way to implement flubber into his old Model-T to make it fly.

Needless to say, Flubber is a real impossibility. It cannot exist within our universe due to the Laws of Thermodynamics. Perpetual energy machines will never happen, but the idea of them can still occur within the human imagination. This book is about what would happen if someone actually invented perpetual energy and the effect it would have on the world. Brainard has to deal with not only the mob but with the U.S. military as well.

I was actually surprised to see the poor guy getting shot at and stuff for his invention, but despite these moments of excitement, the story mostly remains a family friendly comedy. The bulk of the flubber content is used to show its uses in a more common setting. For example, he can iron it onto the shoes of a basketball team, allowing them to jump extremely high. This was actually a very funny part of the story, showing how easy it made everything once you could just freely hop everywhere.

The story does have a really awful villain. One of the fathers of the main characters was a rich man who had mob ties. He came across as someone who would sell his own mother if it would make himself an extra buck. My only criticism was that he was a little over the top, and I felt bad for his son who was getting all of his bad qualities from his corrupt father. It's not a story-killer though. The way the book deals with him was actually really funny.

All in all, I do recommend "The Absent-Minded Professor" as a genuinely good read. Although it does follow the movie pretty closely, the narrative helps give everything better context. I will warn you though that this book is not easy to find. I only found one copy, and it was falling apart, but if you do find it, chances are it will be very cheap. Either way, you can always just see the movie, and that is frankly good enough.

This blog was written on February 16, 2023.

Thank you for reading my blog! Did you enjoy it? Either way, you can comment below, or you can email me at tkwadeauthor@gmail.com. Also stop by my Amazon.com listing by clicking this link: https://www.amazon.com/T.K.-Wade/e/B07BQK9RTZ

Check out my books! Thanks!