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  • Awesome Music:
    • From The Love Bug, the introductory montage of a demolition derby (from the film Fireball 500) set to a medley of Johann Strauss II's "Tik Tak Polka" and the overture to "Die Fledermaus".
    • The entirety of the score from the 1997 remake. Composed by the late Shirley Walker, the music of this film gives the franchise a more melancholic, dramatic and even at times dark tone. Among the tracks that stand out are probably the main theme as well as the Horace the Hate Bug theme.
  • Evil Is Cool: After Herbie, Horace the Hate Bug tends to be the most remembered of the sentient vehicles.
  • Fair for Its Day: The humor surrounding Mr. Wu and Chinese culture can come across as offensive nowadays. However, the movie notably averts Asian Speekee Engrish, Mr. Wu is portrayed positively, serving as a Team Dad for the heroes during the last act, and in the scene where Tennessee speaks to him in Chinese, Buddy Hackett is speaking actual Mandarin Chinese (if heavily accented).
  • Fanon Welding: If one is either curious as to what would likely have happened if Alonzo Hawk had gotten to build Hawk Plaza while cutting corners or feel that Hawk's punishment for repeatedly harassing and stealing from an old woman wasn't harsh enough, The Towering Inferno could loosely be considered an advisory sequel to Herbie Rides Again.
  • First Installment Wins: While Herbie Rides Again has the highest Rotten Tomatoes score (80% versus The Love Bug's 75%), the first film, The Love Bug, is by far the most beloved.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • Tennessee's speech about machines. Particularly this line: "we take machines and stuff 'em full of information until they're smarter than we are".
    • Herbie's attempted suicide in the first film. In Herbie Goes Bananas, he gets thrown off the Sun Princess by Captain Blythe for the ruckus he caused aboard the ship. On the upside, he lives to tell the tale.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • In the first film, Mr. Wu's full name is Tang Wu, which means in Chinese, his name is Wu Tang.
    • An early trailer for Disney Blu-Ray Discs suggested that Herbie: Fully Loaded would become Herbie's first movie to receive a BD release. It ended up becoming the last one.
    • In the first film, after Jim tells Tennessee that he'll be racing with Herbie, Tennesee says "Oh, boy, won't Herbie love that! Le Mans! Monte Carlo!". The third film has Herbie racing in Monte Carlo, but alas, Tennessee wasn't there to see it.
    • In the first film, Thorndyke questions Herbie's success by loudly shouting "There's more going on here than meets the eye!" (Made even better by how Bumblebee's alt mode is most famously a Volkswagon Beetle.)
    • In Herbie Rides Again, Alonzo Hawk intends to build Hawk Plaza, which he desires to be the world's tallest building, in San Francisco and cut corners while doing it. Later that year, a disastrous fire inside the Glass Tower, another "World's Tallest Building" located in San Francisco, shows what likely would have happened if Hawk had gotten to build his skyscraper.
    • In Herbie: Fully Loaded, Crazy Dave's name is this.
  • Iconic Character, Forgotten Title: Herbie becomes the namesake of the series from the second film onward.
  • Love to Hate: David Tomlinson as the villainous Peter Thorndyke. Not just the antics he gets up to, almost every line of dialogue ranges from entertainingly dry wit to Suddenly Shouting.
    • Alonzo Hawk in Rides Again is a ruthless greedy businessman who has no qualms about lying and cheating an elderly woman out of her home to build the skyscraper of his dreams. Had the character been played realistically, people would hate his guts but the fact Keenan Wynn puts on such an over-the-top performance that the character becomes too entertaining to hate.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Thorndyke crosses it when he sabotages Herbie at Riverside and steals victory from Douglas. Hawk seems to have made a living crossing the line just to serve his own ego, but takes it a step farther when he nearly demolishes the firehouse with Mrs. Steinmetz and Mr. Judson still inside.
  • Narm Charm: The film series as a whole. Who would have thought a film involving a man coaxing a car out of suicide would seriously work? How about one where a car has to babysit a little pickpocket through Central America? It just works! Even Dean Jones singing the theme song to Herbie The Matchmaker: it's cheesy, it's corny, but damn it, it's Herbie!
  • Sequelitis: Each sequel proved less and less successful as time passed, but Herbie Goes Bananas kept Herbie on the lot for the next 25 years before his next big-screen appearance.
  • Special Effect Failure:
    • Of course, the ever ubiquitous Driving a Desk shots, present throughout the original series.
    • The 53 gumball on Herbie's door is absent in the 1968 film's "balancing" scene. It was a conscious choice: the bottom of the door had to be cropped so the car could clear the ground to do the stunt, which including the number would have called attention to. An odd example in that it isn't conspicuous in the film itself (it's excusable for the time period and barely noticeable in the scene itself), but a still from the scene was heavily circulated promotion and merchandising of the film, even continuing to be used when the movie was released on video.
    • Tang Wu was meant to be considerably older than Benson Fong, who was only in his early 50's at the time of filming, so the actor was given grey hair. Unfortunately, the effect is not exactly convincing, looking like someone touched up Fong's hair and eyebrows with a coat of gray paint, with black still visible underneath; in many transfers of the film, it looks almost blue in color.
    • Herbie Goes Bananas, despite normally possessing well-done or at least acceptable effects, has one shot (near the end of the bullfight scene) where the green screen looks hideously amateurish.
    • The 1997 film contains quite a bit of CG, mostly involving Horace. It also shows up in some of Herbie's stunts, and the reveal of Simon's factory. Fully Loaded also makes use of heavy (and heavily dated) CGI for much of Herbie's actions outside of simple driving, such as the rail surf and the turnaround at the end of the film.
    • In Herbie Rides Again, the miniature FX work during a scene in Hawk's warehouse is very noticeable, due to Herbie suddenly reducing in size while pushing items off shelves in the warehouse.
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: Jason Torchinsky, a writer for Jalopnik, found out that George Bruns, the first film's composer, may have ripped Herbie's theme song from an obscure John Barry track titled "High Grass". Listen for yourselves!
  • Unintentional Period Piece:
    • The Love Bug is dated by the scene where Carole tries to get help from a pair of hippies.
    • In the original film; the drivers are shown wearing what appear to simply be old football helmets with the face masks removed. Formula One had already made full-face racing helmets mandatory by the 1950s (for contrast, it would not be until Dale Earnhardt's death that NASCAR made full-face helmets mandatory); so those type helmets were already around and used in some motorsports by 1968.
    • Herbie Rides Again features, as a plot point, Alonzo Hawk demolishing an entire neighborhood with his "urban renewal" project. This was a plot point in the 1970s when the destruction of traditional neighborhoods angered urban planners and the public and led them to oppose renewal projects that are nowadays considered white elephants.
    • Herbie: Fully Loaded features Herbie in a NASCAR race. This scene definitely dates the movie for multiple reasons:
      • The race is being called by Allen Bestwick and Benny Parsons, who were the play-by-play and color commentator, respectively, for NASCAR races on NBC and TNT from 2001 to 2006 (there was a second color commentator, Wally Dallenbach Jr., but he is absent in this film). Believe it or not, this was actually dated by the time the film came out in 2005, as Bill Weber had taken over from Bestwick in the booth. Nowadays, Bestwick calls college football games for ESPN (after another stint working NASCAR races with them from 2011 to 2014, then calling IndyCar races on ABC before NBC got the exclusive rights), while Parsons passed away in 2007 of lung cancer.
      • The cars seen are the fourth-generation car used from 1992 to 2007, when it was replaced by the controversial Car of Tomorrow.
      • Of the real NASCAR drivers seen in the film, only Jimmie Johnson is still active as of 2019. Jeff Gordon retired after the 2015 season and is now a color commentator for Cup Series broadcasts on Fox networks, Tony Stewart retired after 2016 and is now one of the biggest team owners in the sport, and Dale Jarrett retired in 2008 and has followed in his father Ned's footsteps by becoming a color commentator, first for ESPN and now for standalone Xfinity Series events on NBC (in other words, Xfinity Series races being held at a different track than the Cup Series, or on weekends when the Xfinity Series is racing, but the Cup Series is off).
      • ESPN reporter Stuart Scott appears in the film. He died of cancer in 2015.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • Tennessee's "safety tip" for making coffee with a blow torch is "always wear asbestos gloves when you make coffee this way." The health risks associated with asbestos wouldn't be identified until the 70s.
    • The scene where Herbie traps Carole at the drive in combines this with Harsher in Hindsight. Imagine you're watching this play out in real life. A car pulls up at a restaurant with a man and a woman inside. The woman wants out but can't get the door open. She becomes more and more frantic, begging and pleading the people on the outside to free her, but no one will help. The only other woman around, the waitress, not only won't even take a second to try and open the door, but scolds her for making a scene. Then she suggests to the man a more private spot where the police don't bother people. Would you assume that the cheeky little car is trying to play matchmaker,note  or would you think that the guy rigged the door and that this woman has every right to be petrified? Considering that infamous murderer Ted Bundy really did own a white VW beetle...Ouch. Although, when they're at Seabreeze Point, the police officer does ask Carol whether she was being harassed by Jim.

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