Funny but not Cricket

Not in those days luvvie...and particularly not in a Walt Disney movie for kids.

Are you for real?

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PretoriaDZ says > Coming from Walt Disney, it seems strange now that no one seemed to notice that using flubber on the shoes was cheating. Also, the long scene where the Professor attacks Shelby, using his Model-T to bash Shelby's stationwagon - in court they could call that stalking and attempted murder!

It's not that those things went unnoticed, I think they seemed justified. People tend to root for the underdog so putting flubber on the basketball players' shoes wouldn't have been seen as cheating. The players on the other team were substantially bigger and were making chumps of the other guys. We can justify the cheating as the professor did; he was evening things out; making it a fair fight, so to speak. From our perspective, as the viewer, we know that Hawk was betting against his son's team. We saw him as corrupt and didn't want him to win; again it gave us the opportunity to justify the cheating in our minds and be okay with it; not seeing it as cheating at all.

By the same token, what Professor Brainerd did to his rival seemed justified because of how he was being treated. The guy had every right to pursue the girl but he was being downright disrespectful of the professor and making a real nuisance of himself. The professor, who we saw as a good-natured, though scatter-brained guy, did nothing to deserve the treatment he was getting. We could imagine if the tables were turned he'd do much worse to the professor.

To be clear I'm not saying I agree with these points but that's what I think was on the mind of the filmmakers and how they thought the audience would perceive what they saw happening on screen. When comparing two wrongs, the lesser wrong may not be considered right but it's the preferable position. We see this in movies fairly often especially kid movies.

For instance, the professor does quite a few things against Hawk that he really didn't have to do but it's in retaliation for what Hawk has done and is continuing to do to him. As he said, he's been asking for it. Also, when he goes to get his car back, he breaks into the warehouse and, though he never lays a hand on them, leaves the two bad guys pretty badly beaten up. He even revives them when they're knocked out. They end up getting even more bruised and battered because he needed them to get the doors opened. Technically, they're protecting their boss' space and the professor has no right to be in there but he's there to get what was stolen from him so we let it pass.


Woman, man! That's the way it should be Tarzan. [Tarzan and his mate]

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When I saw this movie back in 1961 when I was 8, I was cheering for the Professor. When I was watching it last night, both the points you make were a little disconcerting. The attack on Shelby seemed to go on a bit too long. A couple of bumps would have sufficed.

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Actually cheating in the basketball game was just the beginning of decades of cheating by Medford College in various movies.

Medford even started cheating in academic quizzes in the 1995 television movie The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.

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