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.
Herbie does use multiple tail lights in the film, so using the tombstone style lights was partially correct.
Man, The Love Bug is such a part of me. It was the very first movie I saw in a theater and my first car was a 74 love bug limited edition, the green one not the orange one. I wanted to add, If you really want to get into what’s illustrated that wouldn’t be correct for 63, notice the inside of the decklid seems to show a drain tray mounted there as could be found on any convertible or any post 70 bug that came out with vented decklids. Considering the other illustration shows it doesn’t even have a vented decklid it really shouldn’t have a drain tray anyway. but. It fits with what you said. It’s exactly what you’d see if you were looking at like a 78 convertible’s engine compartment. Am I geeking out too much on this?
Man, this brings back memories. I was a huge herbie nut when I was a kid. When I was little my parents used to read this book to me. Every night when they asked what book I wanted to read, it was always the herbie book. I don’t know whatever happened to the book unfortunately.
Now I need to hunt this down on some streaming platform… The car-ish TV show I remember is “My Mother the Car.”
Born in ’74. Aside from the genetic predisposition to love cars inherited from my dad, I credit Herbie with somehow activating the neurons in my young brain that lead me to the adult I am today…a car maniac convinced cars are living and breathing beings with distinct personalities. My Miata autocross number is 53.
Yep, I had that book (and several other old Disney childrens books) as a kid, and read it often. I too wish to know who drew the beautiful illustrations.
Herbie and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang were probably the two most influential movies of my childhood. I was always obsessed with cars, but those two films made cars more than just machines to me. The idea that you could be friends with a car, that a car could be more than the sum of its parts… Those movies more effectively anthropomorphized cars than Pixar’s Cars did. I’ll always have a soft spot for Beetles and vintage prewar cars because of them.
Illustrator put real effort into real engine detail – but mailed in a bespoke mono decklid hinge.
I’ve found Scott Sorrentino credited as the author, but nothing on the illustrator.
Okay you are referencing a movie where a VW BEETLE comes to life. And has a 58 HP air cooled motor that out performs Astons, lambos, and other race cars normally not even raced against each other and your problem is the chubby guy in the picture doesn’t look enough like Buddy Hackett? Please explain!
And a Stratos, I think.
You guys are maniacs!
He/She (Herbie seems to be a bit fluid) also fell in love with a Lancia Monte Carlo!
Well, who wouldn’t!
And, also, in one of the sequels, a tiny 1970s cruise ship somehow has an enormous cargo hold like off a giant old ocean liner
Holy cow that illustration style takes me back to Hallmark Pop-Up Books.
“which, shockingly and somewhat shittily, doesn’t seem to list the author or illustrator! Damn, Disney, why do you have to be like that?”
Yeah, Disney was pretty much always like that; Walt Disney always took so much of the credit (Ã la Thomas Edison, George Barris, and Elon Musk.)
Plemty of people know about Carl Barks who created a number of characters such as Uncle Scrooge and wrote & drew so many of the best Disney comic books of the 40s-60s; known only as the “good Duck artist” he didn’t get any recognition until his retirement in the 60s. Less well known is Floyd Gottfredson who did so much of the creative work on the Mickey Mouse comic strip from 1930 until his retirement in 1975 but the comic strip was always signed Walt Disney; like with Carl Barks a fan tracked down & revealed his identity in the mid-60s. It’s been said that Gottfredson was pretty much responsible for creating the persona of Mickey Mouse, especially in print media such as comic strips & comic books.
(‘Muricans may not know just how immensely popular the Disney comics, especially Mickey Mouse & Uncle Scrooge/Donald Duck, were around the world; kind of ironic that Disney published very few original comic books in the US in the 70s & 80s.)
Those of a certain age might remember those Scholastic Books catalogs that we would get in grade school every so often, as compared to the Scholastic Books fairs that became popular later. I would pore over these catalogs and order novelizations of Disney movies since this was in the days before closed-captioning, hence novelizations being a boon in making films accessible. What was annoying about some of the catalogs & order forms was that sometimes they didn’t provide information about authorship; there was one writer that did a number of the Disney novelizations that I had an almost irrational hatred for named Vic Crume. It would only be when the books arrived that I would find out who the authors were. So whenever I saw Crume’s name I’d go “Oh crumbs, not another crummy book by Vic Crummy.” Still, those books did provide some modicum of accessibility to movies in the pre-closed-captioning days.
To add insult to injury, Disney was the *last* major studio to release their films on VHS with closed-captioning. All the other major studios had been releasing their films on VHS with closed captioning for well over a decade!! Heck, even some of Disney’s earliest DVDs didn’t have closed captioning, ugh.
Yeah, I have a bone or two to pick with Disney, why do you ask?? Ha.
The very first movie I remember seeing in the theater was the first run of The Love Bug when I was just 4 years old; that film was pretty instrumental in sparking my love for things automotive. All the more reason to hold Disney to some standards…
I watched The Love Bug on VHS so many times I wore the tape out. It started creaking so loudly I figured it would break if I ever played it again. And while I had other things in my life that would’ve made me a gearhead anyway, that movie sparked a lifelong love of aircooled VWs and Porsches.
I have a similar story. My parents rented the VHS so many times from the local video rental store that they made me a bootleg copy so I could have it.
Havershaw, if you tell me that the bubbles tickle your nose, I shall probably kill you!
“Get Mister Douglas and his acquisition out of here before I lose my temp-AH“
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.
Waka waka!
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.
John Hannah is a close second.
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.
What about “Herbie: Tokyo Drift”?
The ’97 movie is the dark horse of the bunch. Great cast, and while in many ways a rehash of the original movie, absolutely bonkers at times. I thought Herbie’s attempted suicide was brutal for a kid’s movie, then in ’97 he got cornered in an alley and beaten to death. Then by the time Fully Loaded came out, they were using special effects to shrink Lindsay Lohan’s boobs because they were considered too big for a kid’s movie.
Fatal street violence: A-OK. Women who aren’t flat-chested: obscene.
Plus the idea of a “Hate Bug” coming from old German steel is a bit on the nose.
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.