One of the most astonishing things to me about this project has been discovering how many beloved Disney films are actually adaptations of things. Frequently, these are things so obscure they don’t have their own Wikipedia page; in this case, not even the author has his own Wikipedia page. But The Love Bug is actually based on the book Car, Boy, Girl, by Gordon Buford. According to Dean Jones, he went to Walt with the idea of making a serious movie about the first sports car in the US, and Walt suggested an adaptation of the book instead. This became the last live action film Walt would ever personally be involved in, a fact Jones credits for its success.

Jones plays Jim Douglas, a washed-up racecar driver. He’s reduced to demolition derbies, and Bice (Robert Foulk), his friend who runs them, doesn’t even want him to do that anymore. He likes Jim too much to want him hurt. Still, being a racecar driver is who Jim believes himself to be, and he can’t give it up. One day, while walking the streets of San Francisco, he passes by the high-class import car shop of Peter Thorndyke (David Tomlinson), where he sees a sleek yellow Apollo GT. While he’s there, a certain white VW sees him. The car follows him home, which everyone agrees is pretty unbelievable, and in order to stay out of jail on grand theft auto charges, he’s forced to buy it.

And then, he starts winning car races. His eccentric roommate, Tennessee Steinmetz (Buddy Hackett), believes it’s because there’s something magic to the car. Thorndyke’s lovely saleswoman, Carole Bennett (Michele Lee), comes to agree. But Jim resists, because if Tennessee and Carole are right, than is Jim really driving the car, or is he a passenger? Who’s winning the races?

Tennessee’s philosophy is that people have made so much of machines over the years that it’s hardly surprising when machines start thinking they’re more than just machines. And it seems quite clear that, at least in the world of the movie, we’re supposed to agree. Tennessee gives the example of a claw machine that liked him and basically gave him things he could sell for food and the example of a stoplight that delays six seconds longer for him than for anyone else. Six seconds—enough so that there’s a difference but not enough so that you can really do anything about it.

We all believe that sort of thing really happens, even though we logically know that it does not. Herbie is an extreme manifestation of it, of course, the car that drives itself and nearly hurls itself into San Francisco Bay in despair when it is rejected. But we all believe in at very least the malignancy of inanimate objects. In the Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett, is is a sign that Auditors are near. In this series of movies, it manifests in the objects themselves. In the extreme, we get Maximum Overdrive and various other evil Stephen King machines. But who among us has not blamed the machine for deliberately malfunctioning?

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I wish I could have had a conversation with Terry Pratchett about this movie, because there’s another point of his that comes to mind in conjunction with it. Because we believe in the malignancy of machines, and this movie shows us the beneficence. This is, I think, something we can tie into his discussion of the term “miracle,” and how it can just as easily be applied to any conflation of negative events as positive ones. After all, we call the negative ones an Act of God. And if there are no Auditors to create beneficence in machines, well, we humans are after all better at noticing the bad than the good, I think.

It’s also very human of Jim to not want to believe the evidence of Herbie’s sentience because of what it says about him. Thorndyke believes it because the little car takes an instant dislike to him and engages in low-level maliciousness. So. He doesn’t like the car, so he’s willing to notice that the car doesn’t like him. But Herbie falls in love with Jim. We never call it that, but it does. Therefore, while Jim notices the things Herbie does while trying to make itself noticed, he won’t acknowledge the positive things it might do for him, because that’s just the way things ought to be for him.

And, of course, there’s his own low self-esteem. It’s another term that never comes up, but it’s pretty obviously there. Tennessee couches it in “losing confidence” and other terms, but the fact is, Jim acts cocky because he’s afraid people will notice that he’s not good or important or deserving. And indeed, we don’t know if he is a good driver or not, because mostly, we see him driving Herbie. Carole relates two stories of his crashing cars during his earlier days, after all. Is it the car or the driver? Jim tells Tennessee that he knows in his heart that he’s a racecar driver, but if Herbie is the one doing the driving, where does that leave Jim?

Which is why I kind of want to see a remake of this starring Ben Affleck. I haven’t seen the recent version with Lindsay Lohan, but I’m willing to bet, just based on her age, that the movie doesn’t get as much into the psychological aspects that I find so interesting about Jim’s character. Lindsay Lohan may doubtless have fears that she’s washed up—she’s actually a prime example of my Why There Should Be a School For Growing Out of Being a Child Star argument—but it isn’t quite the same, and since much of her career dissolution is of her own making, it’s missing some aspects of what makes Jim Douglas a more fleshed-out character in this movie.

But Ben Affleck? For one thing, Jim always chews gum while he’s racing, and Ben Affleck often seems to chew gum even when he isn’t. But more to the point, I think he’s adept at projecting an attitude of cockiness that covers up fear. He’s old enough for the role; he’s actually seven years older than Jones was when he made the original. We’ve seen that he can look grizzled or handsome, depending on the needs of the role, and I think that would work for Jim Douglas. And it’s certainly not hard to think of a long list of women who could play the car-savvy Carole, after all.

Besides, wouldn’t Matt Damon make an awfully fun Tennessee? Picture him making Irish coffee with a welding torch. And, hey, it’s a Disney movie where the person cheating at sports is the villain!

Actually, I turn out to have way more to say about this movie than I thought I would. There’s the weird attempt at multiculturalism with Mr. Wu (Benson Fong), who’s kind of a racist caricature but at the same time a guy who clearly loves cars. There’s a hint of cheating in the race he helps Jim enter, but given Thorndyke sabotages every other car in the race, a mere slow fueling stop isn’t much. There’s Carole, who is expected to fit a very specific mold with Thorndyke—he even steps in when he thinks Jim can afford to buy the Apollo GT, rather than letting her make what would surely be a high-commission sale—but who is really the mechanic in the lot and allowed to be with Jim. There’s those gorgeous matte paintings and the existential despair of Herbie in the San Francisco fog. Really, this is a layered movie for something so easily dismissed.