When we decided we’re doing just black cars today for Black Friday, there was one black car that popped into my mind, unbidden but inevitable. I thought of it because it’s not just black chromatically, but black conceptually, in the non-color sense of dark, sinister, evil. It’s a diametrically-opposed counterpart to a famous automotive cultural icon, Herbie the Love Bug. It’s a sentient car named Herbie the Hate Bug, but don’t be too alarmed: it’s not just fictional, but it’s kind of poorly written fiction.
Yes, Horace the Hate Bug! This 1965 Beetle was built to be the antagonist in Disney’s 1997 reboot of The Love Bug, in a made-for-TV movie called, again, The Love Bug. This reboot starred Bruce Campbell (yes, of Evil Dead fame) and was directed by Peyton Reed, the fellow North Carolinian who went on to direct the Ant-Man movies. The man seems to have a thing for movies that reference insects in their titles.
While I am generally happy to see any additon to the Greater Love Bug Cinematic Universe, I tend to think this 1997 movie sort of debased what made the original movie great, and that’s mostly because this movie committed a pretty grave sin of story telling: telling too much story.
It was sort of imperative to the plot to do so, I guess. The too much story that was told has to do with the origin of Herbie, a sentient car. It gives Herbie’s origin an explanation that, I feel, kind of ruins things. Not everything needs a blatant explanation. I think you’ll see what I mean: In the 1997 film, Herbie’s origin is explained by re-casting Herbie as a postwar project by a German scientist named Dr. Gustav Stumpfel, who, in the process of building a car, accidentally drops a photograph of his wife into a vat of molten metal, which somehow transfers all of the loving feelings Stumpfel has for his wife into the car itself, making it sentient and motivated by love.
It’s a pretty inane backstory, even if you overlook the absurdity of a lone person attempting to build a car by starting with a vat of molten metal, but, here, you can watch how it’s shown in the movie here:
The silly story is sort of crucial to the plot, because it explains how the same Dr.Stumpfel is able to be coerced into making another sentient car, but this one ends up imbued with evil and hate, thanks to the villain character who pees into the molten metal or something like that. I forgot the details, but all you need to know is that in the second go, the resulting Volkswagen that was built is evil to the core.
It’s named Horace, perhaps after the Egyptian falcon-headed god? Who knows. Anyway, Horace is pretty menacing looking, for a Beetle:
More importantly, I think it’s worth comparing all of this tortured origin story crap to what passes for the only semblance of an explanation ever given for Herbie’s sentience in the original 1969 movie; there, the sentience was vaguely explained via the philosophical ramblings of Tennessee Steinmetz (played wonderfully by Buddy Hackett):
In the 1969 movie, the car’s sentience isn’t so much explained as an overall evaluation of people’s relationship with technology is postulated. And it’s a surprisingly insightful one, especially today, when the idea of humans “taking machines and stuff them with information until they’re smarter than we are” is more relevant than ever in this era of AI.
There’s no need to be more explicit about anything; it’s the perfect amount of justification.
But let’s get back to Horace the Hate Bug: this is one evil Beetle! Very soon after Horace was created, he was sent to actually murder Herbie, some pretty heavy shit for what is ostensibly a kid’s movie. And he comes pretty close to succeeding! Look:
Yikes! That’s a horribly wrecked Herbie. The movie even includes a funeral for Herbie, with his remains placed in a huge car-casket:
Of course, you can’t really keep Herbie down, and with the help of Dr.Stumpfel, it’s realized Herbie can be repaired, provided all his original parts are used, which would be a colossal amount of labor but, you know, if we can accept sentient VWs, we can deal with this.
Herbie is reborn, but of course there has to be a Final Showdown.
And, of course, that final showdown is a race, and in that race the evil Beetle and its evil driver use all manner of low-down cheaty tactics and the usual array of evil-car devices, like wheel tire spikes and a laser, which eventually cuts Herbie in half:
Of course, Herbie is no stranger to being bisected, and the Beetle of Good’s Teutonic iron will permits him to win the race regardless. A livid Horace attempts to murder Herbie one more time, but this time fails, and ends up plummeting over a cliff and seemingly straight into hell itself:
That car has a great sense for the dramatic, you have to give him that.
The modifications to this 1965 Beetle itself do a pretty good job of suggesting that the car is deeply sinister. Aside from the all-black paintjob, there’s that triple-bladed bumper and hood louvers and the strange oval side windows, blacked-out rear quarter windows, and louvered, tiny rear window. I guess good rear visibility is anathema to the truly evil.
I like the yin and yang sort of concept of Horace the Hate Bug, but I just don’t think it was executed well, really. Besides, I’m not entirely sold that the opposite of Herbie the Love Bug would be any sort of Hate Bug at all; I tend to think the true opposite might be something like Harold the Indifference Bug.
That would be a matchup to watch, right? The Love Bug vs. the Indifference Bug! Someone call my literary agent! She won’t take my calls anymore.
Might want to fix that bit in the very first paragraph.
It looks more sad than angry to me. Maybe that’s what hate really does to cars?
That’s how I feel when I see Jeeps with the angry grill… I just think they look sad and grumpy.
I call those the “constipated” face.
The owners don’t seem to approve of my description, so I’ll continue to keep spreading it.
It seems like the hood louvers are supposed to represent the scales of a snake or something?
More like a German Tiger Tank.
I understand why you wouldn’t it this in a family movie, but if there was a real Hate Bug, it would have to be Hitler’s KdF-Wagen.
No pre-trafficator hand signals in that photo fortunately.
I came here to say Type 87
The Love Bug vs. The Bug That Was Only Following Orders.
Nurburgring time trial? More like Nuremberg trial.
Funny thing, I was just watching the original with my toddler. I mean, I was watching, he was looking at the funny Beetle for 10 minutes and then wandering around off…
Anyway, this led me to a rabbit hole after his nap when I was reading about the Beetle thrown at the sea in Herbie Goes Bananas, and I was sad for that carslaughter – and now I was reminded of a second car slaughter with that mostly dead Herbie.
I think we need to create an association to certify movies as car-cruelty free. “No classics were harmed in making this movie”. Especially nowadays when we can use CGI there’s NO reason to traumatise 7 year olds that just know they didn’t actually recover the car they filmed being thrown overboard, no matter what his dad tells him!
Yes, that damn scene was worse for me than the Johnny Five beating in Short Circuit 2 because I was younger!
I still choose to believe the credits scene in Finding Dory where Hank the octopus is hanging out in a Beetle on the sea floor is supposed to be that specific Herbie still making people happy.
…yes I’m aware Herbie Goes Bananas took place in Latin America and Finding Dory took place between Australia and
definitely not the Monterey Bay Aquariuma certain nameless aquarium somewhere on the West Coast. I still like the use of a Beetle, although I would accept Hank chilling in a Lava Orange Mazdaspeed Miata.Horace’s steering wheel was from Hitler’s staff car. The left turn signal from Charles Manson’s VW. The windshield wipers from that car that played Knight Rider.
Knight Rider wasn’t evil.
I think he meant KARR
No, but his windshield wipers were. It didn’t come up much in the show though
Ed Begley Jr’s electric motor, the most evil propulsion system ever conceived.
This guy gets it. What deep cut, (evil) bless you all
I guess I’ve always known it deep down: Hood louvers are evil!
“A livid Horace attempts to murder Herbie one more time, but this time fails, and ends up plummeting over a cliff and seemingly straight into hell itself:”
TOONCES! NOOOO!!!!!
Toonces. Nice!
I loved the Herbie movies as a kid, as I’ve said here before my childhood infatuation with Beetles has led to me owning one for the last 21 years. I actually remember watching this when this came out even though I was only four at the time. Guess it had me pretty excited. That said I wasn’t really a fan and I haven’t seen it since.
My favorite trivia bit is that the driver of Horace the hate bug was played by John Hannah who ended up getting typecast and dealing with Horace again and again in The Mummy movies.
What gets me about this post is that the Hate Bug is painted in a gloss.
The current trend toward painting flat sucks. Just sucks.
Can we start painting cars in decent paint again?
There are dozens of us who know about this movie. DOZENS!
This franchise has some decent highs and some really interminable lows.
This isn’t even the worst entry, which I would argue, is “Goes Bananas”.
You leave Ocho out of this!
Every movie series starts at the best and loses quality at each new release, kind of like clones. I don’t care what tricks Lucas is playing with Star Wars. As a car guy I say never trust a guy with a car name that isn’t into cars. Frankly a nerd making sci-fi movies with no sex robots always seemed suspicious to me.
I’m pretty sure Alien isn’t better than Aliens. It is all downhill from there though.
I would argue Monte Carlo and Fully Loaded are superior to Rides Again and Bananas. In this case, the quality of an installment can be measured by how much actual racing takes place.
There’s a very short list of ‘sequels that aren’t worse than the original’, and of the top of my head I can only think of Terminator 2 and Aliens (and I’d say that Aliens was as-good-as, but not better, than Alien).
There’s probably a few others, but I can’t think of them right now.
As a Herbie lover since 1969 I wonder how I never heard of this movie. I don’t care how awful it is, I’ve got to watch. I hate Herbie wasn’t nominated for best actor in 1969. #OscarsSoHuman!
It was part of the ABC Sunday night movie series in the 90s. I remember (and still have) my VHS recorded copy. It’s not the worst movie I’ve ever watched but it’s far from the best.
I concur, I just watched the worst movie I have watched the whole way through. Moby Dick 2010. A 500 foot whale taking out submarines but having trouble with cruise ships. In addition it had all the many ever ability of a turd in a toilet, and less than a 70s land yacht.
You’re not missing much. It was nearly as unwatchable as the short-lived TV series. Herbie’s appearance (stripes & numbers all in the wrong places) was so bad in this movie, I’m surprised they didn’t use a Super Beetle.
Too much story reminds me of the Frosty Rudolph crossover movie.
For a long time, I’ve maintained that the opposite of love isn’t hate, but void. It’s something greater than mere indifference, it’s an infinite hole whose incessant demands to be filled can never be satisfied. Love and hate are opposing sides of the same coin of passion, but emptiness isn’t a coin at all.
I often think of the propensity for far too much back story against the interest of pacing and interesting story telling is a more recent phenomenon. (For me, it’s worst when it’s repeated for every reboot of a character everybody already knows the story of or used to explain the evil of a villain as if that somehow justifies them. I don’t know if that’s some BS attempt to engender sympathy for characters who don’t deserve it or inability to write multi-dimensional characters without some hack exploration into their past even when it’s largely irrelevant to the story, but I find it tedious, unnecessary, and lazy.)
Or as Aristotle might say, hate is a corrupt form of love that lives at the extreme.
I miss the days when backstories were dribbled out in small pieces, glimpses of the character’s past, etc. The character stood on their own at the beginning, and backstory merely added context as the show or movie went along. More than anything, it simply fit what tv and movies are – entertainment. The recent trend of overexplaining seems, to me anyway, an attempt to justify them as something more high-brow than they really are.
I was just laying out this very concept to my SO recently. We’re light-horror movie enjoyers (we hit the good ones and occasionally dabble with the less good ones) and one thing that tends to make or break them, especially for me, is if they try to make the infeasible explicable. It’s as if you’re not actually confident in your own premise or don’t respect your audience enough to leave them with questions and puzzles and a bit of mystery, rather than bludgeoning them with “BUT THIS IS HOW WITCHCRAFT WORKS GEDDIT???” It really extra falls over when the movie goes on to negate its own premise in a way it wouldn’t have if it had just kept its damn mouth shut.
I just rewatched Back to the Future after not having seen it in forever. What struck me, aside from how much fun it is, is how it gives us the bare minimum of explanation, just enough to move the story on. How does Doc’s time travel tech work? What does George actually do for a living? Why are a high school hipster and a crazy old scientist friends? None of that matters to what makes the movie so enjoyable, and indeed, it would detract from the story.
To your example, I totally agree that over-explaining in horror movies really kills things, perhaps more than in any genre. Though King hates it, what makes Kubrick’s the Shining so powerful is how little anything at all is explained.
Q) How does Doc’s time travel tech work?
A) The flux capacator, obviously!
Q) What does George actually do for a living?
A) Pre time travel: Ground floor, going door to door for Biff’s multi level marketing scam…Clearly he’s not very good at it.
Post time travel: Same thing but this time George is on top and Biff is under him. Biff is in DEEP!
Q) Why are a high school hipster and a crazy old scientist friends?
A) The less you know the better. Lets just say Doc didn’t buy that plutonium from the Libyans with “dollars”.
(OK He bought it with fake cocaine and the Libyans are PISSED!)
This all checks out.
I totally agree. I absolutely love the BttF trilogy for its lack of unnecessary explication but also for the insane level of attention to detail in keeping the plot developments internally consistent. I don’t mind people taking liberties with the laws of science and nature as long as the story itself is coherent within its own universe.
I’m a moderate fan of King, but I don’t think nearly as much of him as he does of himself. The Dark Tower series is one of my all-time favorites, and I really enjoyed the Gwendy collab, but most of his stories and books seem fairly derivative of older authors (especially early Ray Bradbury). And you can’t deny that every one of the adaptations of his books where he has been in charge of the production has been “meh” at best. The pure genius of Kubrick’s interpretation of The Shining elevated it to the level of a cultural phenomenon. King is a very good author, but he doesn’t have the necessary skills to transition his ideas to the very different medium of the screen, IMHO.
Hot take: Kubrick ruined the Shining. The movie version doesn’t show the one most important element that’s causing Jack to lose his mind.
Yeah, they ruin the flow of a movie and the lingering allure of unresolved mystery that keeps an audience engaged and thinking even after it ends only to reveal that they’re not as clever as they think they are. When talking about the supernatural, it’s pretty much unexplainable by definition. While it’s human nature to try to come with an explanation, mere speculation by the characters is all that’s needed and their conclusions don’t have to be correct as it only really needs to be there to make the characters seem real. Even for real paranormal phenomena, often the “scientific” speculative explanations offered by skeptics are just as ridiculous sounding as the woo woo ones, so why write yourself into quicksand? Is it ego far in excess of talent?
I’m not as clever as I’d like to be, but instead of crawling up my own ass, I write from the perspective of characters who don’t know much of what’s going on and might not even be capable of it (getting answers from established liars in compartmentalized secret organizations, an unreliable narrator with confabulation, or animals dealing with humans). They might speculate, but I don’t pass that off as good enough to be accepted as fact by the audience as so many sci fi/horrors do and I often leave room for doubt, show they were wrong, or have the speculation amusingly incorrect as the audience knows more than the characters. I’m not an amazingly gifted author for knowing this, as it’s pretty basic stuff, so I don’t know where these people come from that they never learned foundational storytelling, an art that humans have been engaged in for likely as long as we’ve existed. Hacks will be hacks, but what gets me is that they’re getting jobs writing for big budget productions and none of the mega millionaire executives in charge of the money are finding better writers even after their movies take a massive shit at the box office.
Or maybe they think their audiences aren’t as smart as they used to be. I don’t think I’m as smart as I used to be.
Its like a home improvement reality show that goes to commercial and when it comes back from commercial they repeat the last 30 seconds that played before the break. Like dude, I didn’t forget what just happed 2 minutes ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k17CU1SAGVk
What a great band…
C’mon Torch I am not sure how old you are but this was true primary 70s cinema. Total nonsense the good guy always wins and for some reason the good guy is a total ass and finally comes around despite being surrounded by true good guys who were good from the beginning.
This being a car site I am perplexed how a VW Bug with 2 or 3 people inside a VW BEETLE and 53 hp. Racing uphillwere able to get above a city bus speed.
That’s what makes Herbie special, somehow. Overcoming mechanical limitations with sheer gumption and charm. Not only your example, but racing against Jaguars, Porsches, and others and beating them.
I think this also led many of us to believe if we show our cars more love they’ll perform and behave better.
Oh thanks given it was the 70s I assumed the white lines were cocaine and Herbie was a partier.
Torch, I have to wonder – I’m probably wasting my breath here and you’re already all over this – if you’re aware of the Superbug film series featuring a yellow ’63 Type 1. They’re generally terrible but any movie featuring cars as characters is virtually guaranteed to be terrible in general except to a very small, eclectic subset of the viewing population.
I suppose Disney named the evil car Horace instead of another name beginning with H that people more commonly associate with Volkswagen because they didn’t want to cause an intellectual property battle with Hitler’s estate.
If they had Horace would have been the first car because Nazi and Herbie would be Captain America VW.
Yeah, I hear the Stuart-Houstons can be pretty litigious
I understand that reference
I mean, they were invented by the Nazis after all
“I mean, they were invented by the Nazis after all”
– Tatra enters the chat
I had no idea whatsoever that this existed. In fact, I’m not even sure I’ve seen the original movie, and if I did, I was young enough to count my age on the stubby little kid fingers of one hand.
Perhaps a (re)viewing is due?
Horace looks kind of good, mostly because of the shiny black paint. Everything else is excessive or restrictive from a practicality POV as Jason explained.
Would Harold be middle grey? What other visual cues would imply indifference? 😉
Brown.
Related: are we going to get a piece today on KARR? Or at the very least, the most impractical villian conveyance ever, Goliath?
Those louvers? You have seen them somewhere, possibily a Coombs Jaguar or a hot rod Model A Ford? Or a high school or military locker door? Yep almost all were the welding eqivalant of cut and paste!
It’s a little overdone but I have to think whoever designed Horace was familiar with how KdF-Wagen prototypes looked.
The Indifference Bug? Really? The Humbug was right there for the taking!
Maybe we can save it for yet another reimagining of A Christmas Carol.
My dad wrote what is now termed fanfic decades ago, and acutally submitted to Disney and was rejected. I keep thinking I should submit it to a Winnie the Pooh facfic site, as it was definitely fitting with the title, “Winnie the Pooh and the Christmas Humbug”.
For Demonic cars – I lean towards Crowley’s 1933 3 1/2 Liter Bentley in “Good Omens”
When I think of demonic vehicles I think of the tanker truck in Duel.
Cruella de Ville’s ride was demonic and black as well
Yes – She drove a Panther De Ville.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-57350742
(Tho in the original animated film, it was purple and black)