He was the "scrambled egghead" who was known far and wide as the "campus kook". Tommy Kirk played Merlin Jones while Annette Funicello played his long suffering girlfriend who always played second fiddle to Merlin's various experiments and schemes.
The popular films made college a sanitized and Disneyfied place, where bumbling administrators stumbled from one escapade to another.
Since both lead actors left The Walt Disney Studios, the film series was abandoned, though it was revived in the late 1960's with Kurt Russell playing Dexter Riley, a cooler version of Merlin Jones who mostly stumbled into his misadventures.
