Merlin Jones

Merlin Jones appears in two movies, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones (1964) and The Monkey's Uncle (1965). Misadventures appears to have been the result of an attempt at a TV show that didn't work out, as it seems to be divided in half with a separate story in each half. It did well enough as a movie, though, that a sequel was made. The Monkey's Uncle, sadly, is not available through Netflix.

Regardless, Merlin Jones is a student at Midvale College (as opposed to Medfield College, features in the flubber and Dexter Riley movies) who, seems to do pretty well for himself despite his professors thinking he's a bit daffy and one of the football players having it out for him (though that might be because Merlin is dating the incredibly cute Jennifer).

In his first misadventure, his experiments with an electroencephalograph lead to him getting electrocuted and temporarily gaining the ability to read people's minds. At first, he uses this to find out what other people think of him (generally positive) and turn the tables on his bully and people looking to take advantage of his good nature. However, he learns that the judge who is hearing his case for a traffic violation (done in the name of science, of course) is planning a crime, and Merlin, with the help of Jennifer, set out to stop the judge. In the end, it's all a misunderstanding, as the Judge is secretly noted crime novelist "Lex Fortis," and Merlin overheard him thinking about the plot to his next book. Merlin gets out of his traffic violation, incidentally, and strikes up a friendship with the Judge.

In the second misadventure, Merlin begins experimenting with hypnotism, first hypnotizing his cat into being more courageous, then hypnotizing Stanley, a chimp kept by the college (and looked after by Merlin's tormentor, Norman the football player), into standing up for his rights. This results in Stanley attacking Norman, but in a comical way and not at all like the horror of a real chimp attack. Norman presses charges against Merlin for attacking him, and Merlin explains to the Judge (the same judge) about the hypnotism. Merlin is found not guilty but is ordered to stay away from the chimp. The Judge is interested because he wants to write a story in which the protagonist has been hypnotized to commit crimes, but Merlin explains that a subject can't be hypnotized into breaking their own moral code. As a wager, he hypnotizes the judge into stealing Stanley from the college. The judge does, and Merlin gets in trouble for being caught with Stanley when he was really just returning him. In the end, Merlin is exonerated, and the Judge comes to realize that maybe the only thing separating him from a hardened criminal is not that he's inherently better but that he's had better opportunities.

And scene.

The second film has Merlin experimenting with sleep learning, and building a man-powered flying machine (as well as a strength formula which allows people to fly it). The name of the film has to do with the fact that Stanley the chimp has been legally named Merlin's nephew as part of an experiment to raise him as a human.

Fitting it into the WW4C

If anyone were going to come up with a serum or test that gave people superpowers, it would be either Merlin Jones or Dexter Riley. I say it's both of them, working together. The Jones-Riley formula is expensive, and you don't know what sort of powers you're going to get, but you will get them.

The Merlin Jones movies were in the mid-1960s and the Dexter Riley movies started in the late '60s, so I figure the Jones-Riley formula may have been available from the late 1970s on. However, it's only available to the very wealthy. Other people will have to get their powers the old-fashioned way: through laboratory accidents, or by being descended from people exposed to "dry rain" in the early 1960s.

Either way, we're still shaping up to have a boom in superheroics starting in the late 1970s.

There's also more about animals here. Merlin is able to hypnotize both a cat and a chimpanzee by just talking to them, which again seems to imply that animals may be able to understand human languages even if they cannot speak them. Given Merlin's track record, Stanley probably became a respected scientist and possibly even a U.S. citizen (like Jake, the cat from outer space).

An Unrelated Note About Tommy Kirk and Non-WW4C Movies

Tommy Kirk's last movie with Disney was The Monkey's Uncle. The story of how he departed from Disney isn't a very happy one. He went on to star in some forgettable beach party movies, two of which, Catalina Caper and Village of the Giants (which is a cross between H.G. Wells' Food of the Gods and a beach party movie) ended up on MST3K. He was also in Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, though I don't recall if he had a very large role.

Fortunately, we've still got at least one more Tommy Kirk Disney film to go: The Shaggy Dog.