The Absent-Minded Professor was one of the first Disney films to be colorized (for the 1986 video release), and, along with 1959's "The Shaggy Dog" and 1963's "Son of Flubber", it is one of Disney's few black-and-white films to be produced after 1941. Professor Brainard (Fred MacMurray) (pronounced BRAY-nard) is an absent-minded professor of physical chemistry at Medfield College who invents a substance that gains energy when it strikes a hard surface. This discovery follows some blackboard scribbling in which he reverses a sign in the equation for enthalpy to energy plus pressure times volume. Brainard names his discovery "Flubber", which is a
Mary and Martha (film) setting up Ms. Swank's somewhat annoying character for a fall that Ms. Blethyn's more interesting character is given short shrift. But the scenes in which the two actresses are together have some real power." Critical with the film, "The A.V. Club"s Simon Abrams wrote that "at first, the off-the-cuff insensitivity that "Mary and Martha"s characters persistently exhibit seems benign enough. "Mary and Martha" is, after all, a made-for-TV melodrama about two mothers that bond after their respective sons die from malaria, and grief does sometimes manifest itself in strange ways. Screenwriter Richard Curtis and director Phillip Noyce do their best