The Love Bug

1968 car race comedy

Rating: 17/20 (Jen: 18/20 [slept through most of the movie], Dylan: 14/20; Emma: 18/20; Abbey: 16/20)

Plot: Down-on-his-luck race car driver Jim Douglas is tricked into purchasing an anthropomorphized Volkswagon Beetle. He paints a racing stripe and a number on it and starts winning races. Shipoopi! The car dealer attempts to first buy the car back and later sabotage the titular bug, and Jim finds himself in a climactic two-day road race to hold onto his little round friend. And no, I'm not calling Buddy Hackett little or round.

Disney's the main problem with this one. With the Disney folk behind the wheel (pun intended) of this production, there's no chance we'd get to see a naked Michele Lee or Buddy Hackett which is really unfortunate. This is the movie that made me fall in love with the incorrigible Hackett as a kid. I like all the performances though. In fact, there was a time in my young life that I wanted to be Dean Jones more than I wanted to be Harrison Ford. David Tomlinson, with perhaps a better agent, could have been one of the greats. He's a great comic villain here though.
Joe Flynn, another Disney regular, is his usually bumbling fun self, and Benson Fong early in my life that [censored because of racial insensitivity]. And Hackett's character is so cool here, this sort of Zen mechanic with a great name--Tennessee Steinmetz--talking about how kelp aerates the liver or how he befriends claw machines or how one can unscrew the inscrutable. I almost wanted to come here and type up how this is the greatest car racing movie of all time, but my heart wouldn't have been in it. I will say with complete sincerity that has one of my favorite scores of all time although I'm saying that while only remembering the theme music and its variations. Watch this movie and you just can't stop whistling that thing. It does sound as dated as the scene with hippies ("We're all prisoners, chicky baby. We all locked in.") seems though. I was amazed even as a kid with how much of a character they made Herbie, and that's without any cheesy special effects to make him frown or laugh like he's in Pixar's Cars or something. It's done with camera angles and lighting, director Stevenson and his cinematographer taking advantage of the Volkswagon's unique curves and features to humanize the vehicle. It's genius. Herbie's attempted suicide--a scene which almost seems too ridiculous now that I type that--was a real downer. But no, this isn't a depressing movie about a suicidal punch buggy. This is a lighthearted family comedy, and the gags are unpredictable and funny, especially a scene featuring a bear which my family really enjoyed. Not Jennifer, of course. She was asleep. It's too bad for her because when we watch Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo, she won't even understand what's going on.

This was the last live action feature that Walt Disney authorized, by the way. Well, unless his frozen head is somehow still running things.