Yes, I know I owe everyone a final recap of the incredible, cross-country journey in that $800, 375,000-mile ex-NYC taxi. And I’ll get to it, I promise! But I need to fly back home today, so I’ll likely have it by Monday. Cut me some slack, I’m coming off of a 75-hour driving trip! But before I head off to the airport, let’s do something genuinely important: evaluate the accuracy of an engine drawing in a 46-year-old children’s book.
The book – which I picked up the book when we were at the air-cooled VW show in Effingham, Illinois – is a Disney’s Wonderful World of Reading edition of The Love Bug, which, shockingly and somewhat shittily, doesn’t seem to list the author or illustrator! Damn, Disney, why do you have to be like that?
The book is an extremely simplified re-telling of the plot of the orginal Love Bug movie, which was released in 1968 and, in case you’re woefully uncultured and unaware, was about a sentient 1963 Volkswagen Beetle race car. The book’s illustration style is very much in keeping with 1970s illustration aesthetics, and while it doesn’t really attempt to make the humans look like their on-screen counterparts, the cars are fairly well-rendered, and that’s what matters.
First, let’s have a look at the overall illustration style here:
The cars are handled with pretty good attention, suitable cartoonified in proportions, but decent attention to details. The ink-wash shading to pick out shapes of parts like the bumpers is well-handled, too. Humans are quite cartoony and some faces get really simplified – look at Carole there in the Beetle and Tennessee in the back – while others, like the villain Peter Thorndyke in the red car and his sidekick, Havershaw, seem to get more detail and focus.
Thorndyke there feels very Aardman/Wallace and Gromit-looking here, as he’s being offered what appears to be a tray of turds and spray paint by Tennessee, who doesn’t look much like Buddy Hackett except in a very, very general round-faced way.
Other than Herbie, the cars are sort of genericized, though they clearly are inspired by specific cars. I think that yellow car up there is standing in for the Apollo GT used in the movie, and Thorndyke’s racer I think is supposed to be some sort of Aston Martin:
The grille shape is quite Aston-Martinish, though the boxiness of the rest of the car isn’t really. But I think that’s what was being suggested.
But let’s get to engines! There’s two illustrations of Herbie in the book that show engines. First, this small one, after Thorndyke sabotages the car with Irish Coffee, hence the whipped cream blobs:
It’s actually not a bad suggestion of a Beetle engine, showing the prominent V-belt from the crankshaft pulley to the generator. But there’s a much more detailed engine drawing in here:
That’s a pretty impressive engine drawing for a kids’ book like this! The level of detail compared to everything else is taken up several notches; this illustrator perhaps had a background in technical illustration, or perhaps hopes of breaking into the field?
In fact, the engine is so well detailed that I can tell you it’s not right. I mean, it is a Beetle engine, but it’s rendered well enough that I can definitively say it’s not the proper engine for Herbie.
Herbie was a 1963 Beetle. Those engines looked like this:
This was the first year of the “clean air” engine, and could be identified by those two fat hoses on either side of the engine that carried fresh air into the heat exchangers. You can see Herbie’s engine fairly well in this screenshot from the movie:
Ooh, Thorndyke, you dirty scoundrel! Anyway, let’s look back at the book’s engine drawing, and an inset of the engine I think it was based on:
See that? I think what we’re looking at here is a 1975 to 1979 fuel-injected VW engine! You can definitely see the distinctive air cleaner hoses and that feed pipe and all the extra complexity compared to the 1963 engine. I suspect the illustrator, working in 1978 or 1979, looked at a then current VW Beetle engine as a model!
Kudos to the illustrator for making something so detailed, though. The taillights are wrong, having the ’68 to ’72 tombstone shape, but I’ll let that slide. For now.
Every time I write about The Love Bug I feel compelled to include this clip of the Bear Gag that appears in the movie, which is one of the finest and most nuanced bear gags in Western literature:
Take a moment and savor that.
Star Wars came out at the same time as a new Herbie movie. I wanted to see the Herbie movie. Everyone else wanted to see Star Wars. I threw a shit fit. We saw Star Wars. It was awesome. But I had to somehow justify my shit fit, so I pretended that Star Wars was only OK…
A bear in an Apollo? Everybody knows a bear’s natural habitat is a Studabaker.
I love these illustrations especially the meaty low profile tires. I just love chunky big sidewalls on small diameter rims.
My cousin had that exact book that was a part of a larger collection of that she had when we were kids. I remember reading and re-reading it quite a few times because car drawings.
Please don’t get me going on Richard Scarry books or I’ll have to go get my kid’s copy of Cars and Trucks and Thing That Go and not get any work done today.
A colleague helped win trivia because he knew Herbie’s number. He immigrated to the US as a kid and loved the movies; he reminded me that the kid in Herbie Goes Bananas spoke Spanish and called Herbie “Ocho” (5+3).
The Herbie movies are why I’m an air-cooled VW fan, and why there’s a 1972 Super Beetle in my garage. By the time I was born in 1993 Beetles had pretty much disappeared off the roads, but my dad had a friend who used to take me for rides in his Beetle. I first watched Herbie when I was maybe three or four, and I would have absolutely loved that book as a kid!
And pleasantly, the Herbie movies are still a delight to watch as an adult, especially Love Bug and Rides Again. After all these years Herbie’s “theme” music still makes me smile every time I hear it.
For some reason, I still remember that the home taped copy I had of Rides Again briefly cut out during the trolley scene and played about 15 seconds of the intro to the Dave Letterman show.
I love the first two movies so much – they’re one of those direct portals back to my early childhood in the late 70s and how besotted I was with cars even then.
Our elementary school library had that book, had not seen it in many, many decades but it is crazy how familiar it all still looks
David Tomlinson was so perfect as Thorndyke. Easily the best villain of the series.
When I saw the pic I also thought “That’s a fuel injected engine” before I scrolled and found your agreement to that assessment.
I love Herbie. Still watch the first two every now and again.
After that, it was all just mid.
Monte Carlo was “ok”.
Goes Bananas can suck-it.
The made for TV movie in ’97 is marginal.
Full Throttle was only OK because it brought him back for another generation. That’s the high-point of that one.
Wasn’t there like a TV series or something in like the late 70s or early 80s? My brain remembers something back then. I guess I need to go research now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbie,_the_Love_Bug_(TV_series)
Yeah, that’s it. So, was Jim Douglas married twice then? The first time in The Love Bug, then again in this TV series? What about in Monte Carlo, or was he just having a fling with Julie Sommars while Herbie was hooking up with the Lancia?
Yeah, Jim Douglas definitely got around.
In more ways than one.
Makes me wonder what old Uncle Walt would have thought about that.
I remember that book!
Buddy Hackett must have been absolutely crammed in the back of that car. I know he was a bit on the short side but what is a comfortable size to be sitting in the back seat of a Beetle?
You forget the infinite legroom he had when Herbie split in two to win first and third in the El Dorado race…
Tho I’m certain he was relatively more comfortable in the copilot seat of the Beetle Cabriolet with Micky Rooney driving in “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”
OMG I forgot about the split/stretch scene LOL I need to watch this again tonight, I haven’t seen it since I was probably 7 years old
“I CAN’T WELD THAT!”
That’s the first movie I was allowed to stay up past bedtime for. It’s been too long, I’ll have to check in on Chief Culpepper and the gang.
And Torch, an Autopian piece on the “Cars of I.A.M.M.M.M.W.” would be kick-ass.
The IMCDb.org page on that movie alone is pretty great,
I believe it may have been the first movie my parents took me to see on the big screen. I would have been 3 at the time.
A few weeks later for my 4th Birthday, I got a choice of whatever I wanted in the Sears Toy Department.
Up on the top-top shelf was a bright red VW Beetle pedal car.
And that’s what I got.
Plus Chocolate Cake.