- The pop culture image of the mad scientist traces back to a tale concocted as part of a wager one unusually chilly summer night in Geneva in the early 1800s. Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" set the image of the mad scientist into the consciousness of readers until the film version of "Frankenstein" in 1931 cemented the visual touches of the castle and the experiments taking place during a dark and stormy night forever.
- Although the film version of "Frankenstein" set the image for the mad scientist's crazy laboratory, there had been precedents set even before this. The most influential of the mad scientists before "Frankenstein" can be found in the German expressionist film "Metropolis." The film, like "Frankenstein," was most influential in setting up the mad scientist as a doctor of incredible talent whose perverse mind is corrupted by the desire to play God. Metropolis' Rotwang infuses life into a machine rather than resurrecting the dead, as is the case in "Frankenstein."
- The iconic image of the mad scientist is the crazed doctor who attempts to create new life from where there was none before by conducting experiments on others. Although not as prevalent, another type of mad scientist is the one who performs experiments on himself. The ultimate mad scientist of this type is Dr. Jekyll, whose insane experiments into personality control lead to the creation of his primitive alter ego, Mr. Hyde, in the Robert Louis Stevenson book, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
- Following the horrors of World War II and the real life mad science associated with both sides of that conflict, the image of the mad scientist changed. Gone, for the most part, were the Gothic trappings of a castle on a hill in a remote village. The updated version of the mad scientist was no longer based on the fictional Dr. Frankenstein, but on real life mad scientists like the Nazis who experimented on human beings.
- Whereas the harnessing of electricity had been the impetus for Dr. Frankenstein's experiments, by the 1950s the new "mysterious force" was radiation. Experiments with radiation and other new scientific breakthroughs of the post-war resulted in the popular imagination construing mad scientists experimenting on human beings to make them grow to enormous sizes, become invisible and create creatures that threatened humanity as a whole.
- Another popular type of mad scientist is the one played for laughs. "The Absentminded Professor" is thought to be mad for creating the strange bouncy substance known as Flubberl, and Jerry Lewis' "Nutty Professor" is a comedic variation on the concept of the Dr. Jekyll type mad scientist whose experiments upon himself go horribly wrong.
- While the mad scientist stereotype has somewhat gone out of fashion in the cinema over the past few decades, there is one medium where the mad scientist remains as popular as ever. A mainstay of comic books, the mad scientist is not only responsible for creating many of the mutated superheroes and supervillains, but very often becomes a hero or villain himself. It is almost impossible to imagine the world of comic books of the past 50 years without the plethora of mad scientist characters.
