Christopher Lloyd essays the wild haired, wild eyed Dr. Emmett Brown, whose time traveling DeLorean sends Michael J. Fox’s Marty McFly on more than a couple trips into the past and future.
And the geeks shall inherit the Earth. Jerry Lewis plays Professor Julius Kelp, a guy with more science skills than social skills. He concocts a potion to turn him into a far slicker guy named Buddy Love — who’s also kind of a jerk. Eddie Murphy starred in the 1996 remake.
Gene Wilder is extra weird as the infamous Dr. Frankenstein — it’s pronounced Frahn-ken-steen — in the 1974 comedic take on the Mary Shelley classic. Shelley probably never envisioned her doctor and his monster in matching coats and tails signing Irving Berlin.
This 1985 cult classic, based on an H.P. Lovecraft story, features the disturbing experiments in re-animation of medical student Herbert West in bringing dead tissue back to life. Very creepy, very gorey.
Dialing down the creep factor, there’s Robin William’s Professor Philip Brainard from the 1997 remake of The Absent Minded Professor. Instead of reanimating dead things, he invents — well, we’re still not totally sure what it was — green goo with a big personality.
Of course, this story originates with Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novella about an otherwise mild-mannered doctor who took a serum in order to separate himself from his vicious tendencies, but then lost control to his evil alter-ego. The 1941 version stars Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman.
Hubris will get you. Scientist Seth Brundle played by Jeff Goldblum attempts human teleportation, but when a fly gets into the transmitter pipe while he tests it on himself, he finds himself losing his humanity and morphing into a terrifying hybrid of man and insect. It’s awful, but wow is Goldblum well cast.
Norman Osborn should have taken a clue from Seth Brundle — never experiment on yourself. His experiment with strength-boosting vapor turns him from an ambitious but desperate scientist into a classic comic book psycho.
You’ve got to give it to Peter Sellers — he plays three different characters in this 1964 dark satire of the Cold War, including the titular Dr. Strangelove. Dr. Strangelove is a former Nazi and director of research and adviser to the President. When the nuclear apocalypse is nigh, he, in his stiffly fidgeting, awkwardly grinning way, proposes plans to “preserve the nucleus of human specimens.”
This is the face of madness.
Erin Carson is a Staff Reporter for CNET and a former Multimedia Editor for TechRepublic.
