The Absent Minded Professor – 1961
At first, I was unimpressed with the special effects in this Disney movie. Some of them looked incomplete, while others looked ridiculously simple. But the more I think about the movie, the more I think I might have been mistaken. So while the effects may have been silly, repetitive, and ultimately not worthy of an Oscar win, they were at least deserving of their nomination. Let me explain.
The word of the day is flubber, a fictional substance that, when striking a surface, does not lose energy, but gains it. Thus, when a flubber ball bounces, it continually bounces higher and higher. It allowed a car to fly, a basketball team to bounce over the heads of their opponents, and… well, really, that was about it. All the effects in the movie were simply variants on those two things.
It is important to note that this movie was geared towards children, so silly and repetitive was what Disney wanted. But that was one of the problems. Not so much the silliness, but the way the same effect was used over and over again. For example, the basketball scene was fun and amusing. But later on in the movie, we see a man with flubber on the soles of his shoes bouncing over his dance partner’s head, just like the basketball players. Later we see a man bouncing out of control in his front yard. It was all the same effect, just dressed differently. And the flying car effect was also treated the same way. Here is the car flying at night. Here it is flying above another car. Here it is flying over Washington D.C.
That being said, I really had to get past my own prejudices over the childish nature of the film, and look at the effects based on their own merits. When I saw the basketball players bouncing up to the ceiling, I had to wonder. How did they do it?
My first notion was that they were all on wires, but a friend pointed out to me that if that was the case, they didn’t have the technology in the 1960s to digitally remove the wires from the final image. Then I thought that they had to have blue-screened all the athletes, and then manually moved them within the frame of the picture. But despite this being filmed in black and white, there were no telltale discolored outlines around the basketball players. They were expertly composited into the scenes. I could find nothing on the internet specifically saying how they achieved all the bouncing people, but I have come to believe that they were, in fact, suspended on wires. They moved as if they were. But I also found that while blue-screening was not used, they did use a similar technique called sodium vapor processing, which, in a black and white film, might virtually erase the discolored outlines around composited images. The flying car was indeed on wires, suspended from a rectangular platform, which was lifted up by using a one hundred fifty foot crane, though I never saw a single wire. Ok, Disney. I am grudgingly impressed.