Actor Dean Jones died this past week from Parkinson's Disease at the age of 84. Though he had a long and fairly successful career on both stage (he and Jane Fonda made their Broadway debuts as co-stars) and screen, he found his greatest success as the likeable star of a series of family comedy films made by the Walt Disney studio in the 1960s and 1970s. You're reading about him at a car site because his best known role was portraying racecar driver Jim Douglas in the 1968 hit movie, "The Love Bug".
The plot of that film, if I recall it from the time I took my little sister to see it at the Americana theater that year, was that Douglas was down on his luck and had to resort to racing his VW Beetle, Herbie, who turned out to have wheelstanding power to go along with a mind and soul of its own. Jim went on to win the race and the girl.
The Love Bug also starred Michelle Lee as Douglas' love interest in addition to one of my parents' favorite comedians, Buddy Hackett, as Herbie and Jim's racing mechanic Tennessee Steinmetz. Racing and engineering legend Andy Granatelli had a cameo role. My seven-year-old sister loved it and my own 13-year-old car enthusiast self was entertained enough to not be too offended at the preposterous notion of a VW Beetle beating Stingrays, Cobras and XKEs (yeah, I know the correct nomenclature is E Type, but that's what everyone called them back then).
The film was so well, er, loved that, like the evergreen Disney animated classics, it was able to make money in sequential re-releases. The Love Bug also spawned moderately successful theatrical sequels like 1977's "Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo", and television shows including a 1982 television series, "Herbie the Love Bug", and a remake of the original as a TV movie in 1997. Jones reprised the Jim Douglas character for each of those productions but Bruce Campbell was the leading man and driver of Herbie for the made for TV remake. Jones did not appear in the first sequel, "Herbie Rides Again", from 1974, nor the last, 2005's "Herbie, Fully Loaded", starring Lindsay Lohan at the wheel of Herbie. A total of six Love Bug/Herbie films have been made.
The Love Bug didn't just inspire sequels and TV shows. If you go to enough car shows, you'll see Herbie replicas. I saw one a few weeks ago on Woodward at the Dream Cruise and a promotional Herbie made for the studio on display at a roadside car museum in rural Illinois last week. You can count on the Vintage VW Show in Ypsilanti to have at least a couple of Herbies every year.
That's where I photographed these replicas including Lynn Anderson's 1965 VW based Herbie. Anderson writes for Dune Buggies & Hot VWs, a magazine popular with air-cooled VW enthusiasts for decades, and she's proud of how accurate her personal Herbie replica is. Accurate enough to have been invited to participate in the prestigious Eyes On Design show, which last year featured movie and TV cars including some authentic, used-on-screen vehicles. Actually, Lynn's car isn't perfectly accurate. Her Herbie is a hardtop, whereas the original Herbie had a fabric sunroof, like the other Herbie at the VW show that day, though Lynn said that car wasn't the correct year.
In case you've never seen The Love Bug and you're wondering how an anthropomorphic automobile and Dean Jones' affable nature could sustain such longstanding whimsical affection, the complete film can be seen in the video at the top of the post.
Photos of Herbie replicas by the author. You can see the complete photo gallery here.
Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth, a realistic perspective on cars & car culture and the original 3D car site. If you found this post worthwhile, you can get a parallax view at Cars In Depth. If the 3D thing freaks you out, don't worry, all the photo and video players in use at the site have mono options. Thanks for reading – RJS
The post Herbie Loses A Friend – Dean Jones Dead at 84 appeared first on The Truth About Cars.
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