Philip/Ned Brainard (The Absent-Minded Professor/Flubber)
One of the more beat-for-beat original/remake pairs featured in this list, The Absent-Minded Professor and Flubber both center around Prof. Brainard (Fred MacMurray and Robin Williams, respectively), a scientist who teaches at Medfield College and is so obsessed with his research that he misses his own wedding three times. While the Robin Williams rendition attempts to make this seem a little less ridiculous by adding financial pressures—he hopes his research seeking to discover a new energy source will prove profitable enough to save Medfield from closure—three times is still really, really bad. Even when movies don’t pitch mad scientists as individuals to fear, one message is pretty much universal: they are not marriage material. Getting ditched at the altar for the discovery of “flying rubber” is practically a best-case scenario.
Dr. Emilio Lizardo (The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai)
Cult 1980s hit The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai is the sort of film where every character is at least a little bit off-kilter, but even in context, Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow) still ranks a cut above the rest on the insanity scale. The film introduces Lizardo as a long-term resident of the Trenton Home for the Criminally Insane. Decades before, he jumped the gun on testing a prototype “oscillation overthruster” (a device that enables one to travel through solid matter) and ended up stuck between dimensions, causing him to go insane. Only, as it turns out, not exactly—upon breaking into the 8th dimension, he ran into alien military leader Lord John Whorfin, who proceeded to take over Lizardo’s mind. Whoops.
Dr. Robert Hoak (Pirahna)
To be fair, Dr. Robert Hoak (Kevin McCarthy) doesn’t unleash the genetically engineered super-piranhas on the unsuspecting public—the film’s inept heroes manage to do that all on their own after trespassing into Hoak’s research facility—he just made them. While the endeavor was originally government-funded in the midst of the Vietnam war, that really fails to explain away why Hoak continued working on the killer fish after the war ended and the feds ceased funding him, nor other even stranger-looking creatures crawling around his lab, which the film never explains or even properly addresses. They’re just sort of there, like a would-be Chekov’s gun that just disappears down a rabbit hole. Hoak, more or less kidnapped into helping stop his creations, ultimately follows the relatively common “death is the only redemption” path, in which a mad scientist realizes the error of his ways and sacrifices his life in an attempt to help right his wrongs—in this case, rescuing a little boy from the shoal of super-piranhas but getting eaten in his place.
Dr. Julius No (Dr. No)
While the presence of Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman) is felt from practically the first scene of James Bond’s first cinematic outing, it’s nearly an hour and a half into the film before the man finally shows up on screen. He’s powerful, in control, a puppet master pulling strings—the first criminal mastermind of the Bond film franchise. He’s suave and organized in a way not often seen in mad scientists. That said, his identity as a mad scientist is impossible to deny: a specialist in radiation, his research cost him his hands, which were then replaced by super-strong bionic replacements. When both the United States and Soviet governments fail to subsidize his genius, he joins the criminal organization SPECTRE, because they appreciate him. When MI6 agent James Bond (Sean Connery) starts sniffing around his reclusive island Crab Key off the coast of Jamaica, Dr. No repeatedly tries and fails to kill Bond (one attempt involves a spider, because of course). The scientist himself ends up boiling to death in the coolant of his overheating nuclear reactor. Gone but not forgotten, Dr. No’s death sparked SPECTRE’s ongoing vendetta against Agent 007.
Edward Jessup (Altered States)
“Remember, kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down,” is a MythBusters quote that comes to mind when considering Altered States, a film revolving around psychopathologist Edward Jessup (William Hurt) and his increasingly extreme adventures with hallucinogenic drugs under the guise of “science.” Of course, his adventures end up going too far, but Jessup turns things around in the eleventh hour and actually lives to see the end of the movie. Shocking.
Brackish Okun (Independence Day)
While technological expert David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) gets to be both cool and MIT-affiliated, Area 51 director of research Dr. Brackish Okun (Brent Spiner) is about one degree of crazy away from frothing at the mouth. “They don’t let us out much,” he mentions as if this fact was not already painfully obvious. He’s also a member of the “excited to lead the alien dissection while everyone else is worried” club, and as usual, it does not work out well for him.
Dr. Strangelove (Dr. Strangelove)
It may be named after him, but Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers) doesn’t appear until more than halfway through the movie. It is only after Soviet ambassador Alexei de Sadeski (Peter Bull) insists that the Soviets made their own doomsday device as a response to the Americans building one that President Merkin Muffley (also Peter Sellers) turns and asks his scientific advisor if these claims are true. And so sparks the first of Dr. Strangelove’s many speeches that pushes the world closer and closer to nuclear annihilation—and ultimately right over the edge.
Everything about the wheelchair-bound former Nazi scientist and current scientific advisor to the President of the United States is bizarre. His tinted glasses indoors are bizarre. His black-gloved, uncontrollable mechanical arm, with its spastic Nazi salutes and repeated attempts to choke its own owner, is bizarre. His voice, always strained as if trying not to burst into laughter or perhaps on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is bizarre. He is strangeness personified in a way not quite like any mad scientist before him, and he is also easily the most iconic mad movie scientist of the 1960s.
Egon Spengler (Ghostbusters)
While ghost-hunting isn’t exactly a traditional pastime and any of the film’s three parapsychologists could reasonably be featured here, much like in the case of Doctor X, the maddest of the bunch has been singled out as an example. Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) doesn’t just do all the heavy lifting for the team from both the theoretical and practical angles, designing the Ghostbusters’ equipment. In addition to being the most socially inept of the group, in traditional mad scientist fashion, his hobbies include collecting “spores, molds, and fungus.” You do you, Egon. You do you.
Dr. Horrible (Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog)
Okay, so it’s technically a miniseries, but it’s three 42-minute episodes and 3*42 = 126 minutes, which is a perfectly reasonable runtime for a feature-length film, so I’m bending the rules a little bit. While I often find Joss Whedon’s work to be a little too navel-gazing for my taste, I think his meta-snark actually works well here—perhaps because the tropes surrounding mad scientists are so genuinely ridiculous. Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) has two goals in life: one, to win the love of his crush, Penny (Felicia Day), and two, be accepted into the Evil League of Evil. Needing to commit a murder to achieve the latter, he invents a Death Ray which he intends to use against his nemesis Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion). Only the weapon ends up malfunctioning, killing Penny.
Dr. Evil (Austin Powers)
A graduate of Evil Medical School, Dr. Evil comes up with various evil plots for world domination and/or destruction from his secret lair that usually involves a lot more engineering than medical knowledge. With his love of building creative new instigators of death and destruction in the form of bombs and/or lasers and repeated comeuppance through his total disconnect with reality, Dr. Evil is a parody of other mad scientists who have come before who has since become an iconic figure in his own right.
Related Topics: Big List, David Cronenberg, Science, Science Fiction
