Herbie Loses A Friend - Dean Jones Dead at 84
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.
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When I was a kid we would rent The Lovebug from the local grocery store, we'd rent it ALOT. It was that and Beethoven, which I never knew featured Dean Jones as a villain, not until a decade later. I'm sad to see Dean Jones pass away, he was kind and had a good sense of humor in interviews, one of the few actors you'd genuinely like to meet with. From interviews, it seems that Dean was offered the chance to act in Rides Again and Herbie Goes Bannanas but he didnt like the scripts, supposedly he was to cameo in Fully Loaded but that was cut. I think 7 Herbie films total were made, the only one I never liked as a kid was Bananas (the film that inspired ratrods). During my hipster teen years I discovered "Superbug", a deranged German knock-off of Herbie that I'm pretty certain inspired both Transformers and Knight Rider.
RIP Mr. Jones . I took my Son to see Herbie when it was re released , as I had a VW Shop at the time it made a huge impression , his first car was a 1963 DeLuxe Beetle with sliding sunshine roof.... -Nate