Herbie the Love Bug (1968-1980) – Review

Men’s love affair with cars dates back to Karl Benz’s three-wheeled motor car in 1886, and it’s only gotten worse over time. This unabashed love affair has been highlighted quite often in the world of cinema, creating a genre unto itself. Yet if one were to be perfectly honest, we’d have to admit that this love goes only in one direction, but what if it didn’t?

 

The Love Bug (1968)

The basic premise of Disney’s The Love Bug is that down-and-out race car driver Jim Douglas (Dean Jones) catches the eye of a magical little Volkswagen Beetle named Herbie, and along with his pal Tennessee Steinmetz (Buddy Hackett) and love interest Carole Bennett (Michelle Lee), they enter a variety of races, much to the chagrin of villainous Peter Thorndyke (David Tomlinson), He is the car dealership owner who sold Herbie for a song but now desperately wants the little car back. Madcap hijinks ensue. Watching this film, one can’t help but wonder “What it’s like to be upstaged by a car?” This isn’t normally a concern among actors, that is unless you’re David Hasselhoff, but Herbie the Love Bug is such an amazing character that he can’t help but capture your heart while stealing every scene he’s in, and considering this film has Disney legend Dean Jones and comedy giant Buddy Hackett one must say that Herbie had stiff competition, not to mention the beautiful Michelle Lee as a love interest that was more than arm candy for the hero.

Note: This is the Disney Era, where 90% of scenes that take place outside would either have used a terrible blue screen process shot or a matte painting. Lucky for this film, the matte paintings were by the great Peter Ellenshaw, and they are truly spectacular.

This is one of my favourite Disney movies from my childhood, and with the pairing of Dean Jones and Buddy Hackett in a film about a magical car, how could it not be great? Then add into the mix David Tomlinson as this film’s deliciously nasty villain, with Joe Flynn as his hilariously inept sidekick, and you’ve got comedy gold coming from every direction. If Herbie skipping across a lake doesn’t put a smile on your face, check your pulse; you’re probably dead.

 

Herbie Rides Again (1974)

This is a bit of an odd sequel as it ditches the human cast from the original with the script trying to explain their absence by stating that the Dean Jones character is over in Europe racing foreign cars, which makes no sense as there is no reason why he wouldn’t take the unbeatable Love Bug overseas to race, this a serious case of lazy writing. In this outing, we find Herbie living with a sweet old lady, “Grandma” Steinmetz (Helen Hayes), who lives in an old, abandoned firehouse, but unscrupulous real estate developer Alonzo P. Hawk (Keenan Wynn) needs that property so that they can begin construction on his newest office building, with Wynn reprising his role from The Absent-Minded Professor. Steinmetz refuses to sell, and so Hawk sends his naïve nephew Willoughby Whitfield (Ken Berry), who is just out of law school, to hopefully talk the old girl into selling. All this does is result in him meeting and falling in love with Steinmetz’s neighbour Nicole (Stefanie Powers) and taking sides against his uncle, basically, this is the plot from about a dozen Disney films that came out in the 60s and 70s.

To say this outing doesn’t make a lot of sense is being generous. We constantly see Hawk and his flunkies breaking the law, from grand theft auto to burglary, but for some reason, our heroes never think to phone the police, and one of our protagonists is a bloody lawyer. Then there is the whimsy being raised by a factor of ten as not only do we have Herbie the magical car but now there is a sentient jukebox and streetcar, not to mention a finale consisting of an army of sentient Volkswagens, and that’s not even the silliest thing we see on screen because at one point Hawk’s lawyers chase Herbie, on foot, up the cabling of the Golden Gate Bridge, and sure, this is a fantasy film but even a fantasy film has to have some kind of intrinsic logic or risk losing the audience.  Overall, Herbie Rides Again is a big step back in quality from the original film; we don’t even get that much in the way of cool car stunts to help us overlook the plot holes, and only Helen Hayes, Keenan Wynn and Stephanie Powers, who is this film’s requisite love interest, make the film at all bearable.

 

Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo (1977)

In this sequel, Dean Jones returns, with nary a mention of the events of the previous film, with a plot line that basically comes down to “The Love Bug is Lovesick” while also being surrounded by a ridiculous subplot about a stolen diamond, which is unknowingly hidden inside Herbie’s gas tank, which results in a lot of attempted comedy from bumbling thieves and keystone cops. I’d say it was nice to see Herbie back at the races, having spent the last film fighting an unscrupulous real estate developer, but the racing on display here is fairly boring and nowhere near as inventive as what was seen in the original 1969 The Love Bug.

We not only get Herbie in love with another car, which comes across as goofy as it sounds, but also a faltering romance between Dean Jones and Julie Sommars, a rival driver hellbent on proving women are just as good as men behind the wheel, but as the chemistry between Jones and Sommars is practically non-existent any time spent with them together does nothing to bolster the proceedings. Then there is the “Don Knotts Factor” with Knotts stepping into the position previously held by the hilarious Buddy Hackett, and he is basically the fifth wheel of comedy and we are all left wondering “Why is he even in the car, no one else has their mechanic as a co-pilot?” all the while waiting for him to provide and sort of comedy that, sadly, never arrives. The original film is one of my favourite live-action Disney comedies. Still, as a franchise, Herbie is the victim of the Law of Diminishing Returns as this film fails to deliver much in the way of laughs or even cool racing moments.

 

Herbie Goes Bananas (1980)

Once again Dean Jones is MIA in a Herbie sequel, with his character now having abandoned Herbie, again, and left the little car to his nephew Pete Stancheck (Stephan W. Burns) and his pal Davy “D.J.” Johns (Charles Martin Smith), who want to race the little car in the Brazil Grand Prêmio. To put it bluntly, this is not a good movie; in fact, it’s a pretty terrible one, and whatever magic generated by the original The Love Bug is long gone. We must now suffer through some of the strangest comedic shenanigans in a story that is full of more nonsensical madness than it is an actual plot.

Aside from the two bumbling Americans trying to get to the race, we also have Herbie teaming up with a young Mexican pickpocket named Pepe (Joaquin Garay III), a psychotic cruise ship captain (Harvey Corman), a man-hungry woman (Cloris Leachman) with her sites set on the Captain, and a trio of villains trying to plunder a lost Inca city. It’s like the writers had three different scripts and just mashed them together and called it a movie. The film does have some nice Herbie stunt driving, certainly, more than what we got in Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, and seeing the Love Bug acting as a matador in a bullring was at least an interesting idea, sadly, at a meagre 97-minutes the film still seems long and when the end credits finally roll we are left wondering “Wait a minute, the movie can’t be over, we haven’t even got to the big race yet!”

Overall, by this entry, things have really fallen apart and what magic existed back in the late 60s has come here to the 80s to die, and the only real entertainment I got out of this film was watching John Vernon, Richard Jaeckel and Alex Rocco as the three villains because even in a crap film these guys are great to watch.  Watching this last entry in the original Herbie the Love Bug series one can’t help but wax nostalgic at a lovable little car that can skip across a lake and steal your heart, and maybe try and forget how far it fell.

But this was far from the end of everyone’s favourite Volkswagen Beetle, in 1982 Dean Jones reprises his role as Jim Douglas for a television series, that only lasted five episodes, and then in 1997 horror icon Bruce Campbell took the wheel in a Wonderful World of Disney made-for-television remake of the original, sadly, as of today, Herbie last big appearance was in the 2005 Lindsay Lohan comedy Herbie Fully Loaded, a film that is considered by most to be only slightly better than Herbie Goes Bananas, which is not a very high bar to clear.