Kill Some Time By Watching This Old Beetle Documentary With Me And Obi-Wan Kenobi: Cold Start

I was looking for some arcane bit of old Volkswagen Beetle information on the internet last night, an act which is perhaps alarmingly common in my life, when I stumbled upon something I’d forgotten about: this wonderful documentary about the VW Beetle that I was in, along with my good pal I’ve never met or even really spoken to, Ewen McGregor.

The documentary has been around since 2016, but up until now I think the only way to see it was to pay money – I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that, the makers of this thing deserve to make some cash from it – but it looks like now it can be seen for free, albeit with commercials, which seems like a reasonable trade-off. After all, that’s how we got to watch the glory of Alf and Becker, all those years, right?

Here it is, if you’d like to kill an hour and 20 minutes instead of pretending to work on this last Friday of the year:

I think it’s a really well-done documentary! Damon Ristau has a good sense of pacing and let all of us VW geeks get lots of information out there without it being too dense. There’s a lot of great people in here, too, like Randy Carlson (a legend in the VW community), Tory Alonzo (perhaps the leading expert on the VWs used in Disney’s Herbie movies), Andrea Hoitt (author of an excellent book on the Beetle), and of course Ewen McGregor, perhaps best known as “young man” in one episode of the series Karaoke from 1996.

Oh, and I’m in it, too. I do sorta wish they left more in there about how many different people contributed to the development and design of the car that would become the Beetle – it’s a bit Josef Ganz heavy there, but he does have a compelling story, so I definitely get it, and was – and still am – always happy to talk about his contributions to the story.

The documentary has scenes from Europe and America and Brazil and Mexico, and it’s good at showing a broad spectrum of what the Beetle was and still is. It’s a subject that’s been covered plenty of times, but I think this documentary still manages to convey the story well and not in the same ways we’ve seen before.

This all makes me really want to get my Beetle running again. I’m such a deadbeat!

Oh! And this is the documentary that has the scene that I sort of suspect VW’s ad agency was inspired by when they added this scene of a dad making his Beetle “talk” to his little kid in VW’s Super Bowl ad this year:

…which feels and looks a lot like this scene from the documentary with me and my kid:

I mean, I can’t prove that they saw this and thought to re-create a more nostalgic version for the commercial, but it sure feels like it.

Regardless, it’s a fantastic documentary, and definitely worth a watch, especially now that it’s free!