Dean Jones, an actor and singer who made his name in a string of popular Disney films in the 1960s and ’70s, notably as a racecar driver in the “Love Bug” franchise, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 84.

The cause was Parkinson’s disease, said a spokesman, Richard Hoffman.

Precocious and multitalented as a youth, the boyishly handsome Mr. Jones began his career as a teenage radio host and performer in amateur musical revues. He became a stage actor, and he and Jane Fonda made their Broadway debuts together. But it was not until the mid-1960s that he found his niche, as the affable, hapless, clean-cut Everyman in a series of genial family comedies produced by the Walt Disney Company, beginning in 1965 with “That Darn Cat!”

Walt Disney himself had recruited him after being impressed by his performance in the title role of the 1962-63 NBC sitcom “Ensign O’Toole.” Mr. Jones, a Navy veteran, played a diffident, prank-loving junior officer aboard a destroyer in the series, which preceded “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” on NBC’s Sunday night schedule.

Along with the child star Hayley Mills, Mr. Jones became the face of Disney’s film brand, and often a befuddled one. He specialized in playing characters who found themselves more often than not contending with confounding or preternaturally intelligent animals. “That Darn Cat!” was followed by “The Ugly Dachshund” (1966), “Monkeys, Go Home!” (1967), “The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1968) and “The Shaggy D.A.” (1976).