Review of The Love Bug (1968) by Edith N — 08 Mar 2007

See, now, this is the kind of thing that Disney just shouldn't try remaking. Come on! Dean Jones? Buddy Hackett? That one guy who was the dad in [i]Mary Poppins[/i]? The woman who totally looks like Suzanne Pleshette and isn't? Or, as Gwen puts it, the mere absence of Lindsay Lohan shouldn't make the original into a masterpiece of cinema.

Still, there it is. First [i]The Parent Trap[/i] and now this. Oh, Herbie! How they've wronged you!

What's more, you're not going to see a Disney movie made today in which the anthropomorphized car tries to kill itself by hurling itself over an embankment. That's some real pathos. Herbie is really hurt by Jim Douglas's betrayal. You can't really blame him, either. Jim's known since the beginning that there's something unusual about that little car.

In fact, both of our teams of main characters cheat like crazy in the final race, the El Dorado. As if having a sentient car weren't enough, there's also the team of young Chinese men lifting the car back onto the road--and the old Chinese men delaying Thorndyke at the gas station. (The leader of the young Chinese men's pretty cute, too.).

Still, all the cheating the Douglas team does can't begin to compensate for the level of cheating of the Thorndyke team. By rights, they should [i]not[/i] get that second place medal. (Sorry for the spoiler, but come on! The movie's nearly 40 years old--and besides, it's Disney; you should know going in.) Those other drivers should have said something to the judges, don't you think?

Herbie triumphs. As Jim says, he tears himself apart to do so. He actually splits in half, but he still gets them across the finish line. That's the triumph of the anthopomorphized automotive spirit.