Animation director Chuck Jones created the Road Runner, an extremely speedy bird that literally runs on roads in the U.S. southwestern desert, in 1948. Together with writers Tedd Pierce and Michael Maltese, Jones paired the road-running fowl with a hungry coyote, later given the name of Wile E., who has an overweening belief in his own ingenuity and in scientific methods and instruments of ACME Corporation design for use in his constant pursuit of the elusive, fast bird. Regarded by Jones as a violently comedic parable for the modern conundrum of advanced technology versus an indomitable force of nature, or for a man's quest for the perfect, succulent bird (woman) that is always beyond his reach, Wile E. Coyote's chase of the Road Runner has lasted for a half-century and continues unabated in television reruns of the classic Warner Brothers cartoons. Wile E. Coyote is every man's failing hero. His facial expressions or proclamations on hand-held signs as one of his schemes is about to go painfully awry are always totally empathetic. He becomes so single-minded, so fixated on his pursuit of Road Runner that he forgets his original, gastronomic intentions and has become determined to catch the Road Runner to preserve what is left of his dignity, and fails constantly to consider Murphy's Law, even as he attempts schemes that by all standards of credibility cannot possibly succeed: trying to fly in a poorly-fitting Superman costume, or encasing himself inside of a steel ball of random trajectory, or fixing an arrowhead onto his nose and sling-shooting himself at the Road Runner, or using a wheeled helmet on a wire to ride upside down off of a cliff. The ACME materials that he utilizes become more and more fantastic, like tornado seeds, earthquake pills, dehydrated boulders, an ice-making machine, and a jet-powered unicycle, and all fail by necessity of their one possible fallibility, which Wile E. never anticipates. In Jones' Road Runner cartoons, starting with "Fast and Furry-ous" (1948), nothing happens to Wile E. that Wile E. does not initiate. The Road Runner can only harm him after the chase has already begun by suddenly beep-beeping (the Road Runner's one characteristic sound) and startling Wile E. into falling off of a cliff, jumping upward and hitting his head on a rock formation, etc.. Between 1948 and 1964, Jones directed 24 Road Runner cartoons, with "Beep Prepared" (1961) nominated for an Academy Award and with animation for "To Beep or Not to Beep" (1963) used in 1962 for an unsold pilot episode for a prime-time television series, The Adventures of the Road Runner. Jones' final Road Runner cartoon of this period was "War and Pieces" in 1964. Two further Road Runner cartoon shorts by Jones, "Zip Zip Hooray" and "Road Runner-A-Go-Go", were edited from sequences in the unsold pilot episode. DePatie-Freleng Enterprises was formed in 1964 after the Warner Brothers cartoon studio was closed, and Jones' fellow director of more than 25 years, Friz Freleng, revived the chase by Wile E. Coyote of the Road Runner for an additional series of cartoon shorts, starting with "The Wild Chase" (1965), directed by Freleng and Hawley Pratt, in which Wile E. and Sylvester Cat join inept forces to pursue the racing Road Runner and Speedy Gonzales. Robert McKimson then directed "Rushing Roulette" (1965), a Road Runner cartoon short almost entirely in the Jones style, with Wile E. attempting and failing to catch the Road Runner by rigging a photograph machine with a cannon, putting all-stick glue on the road, attaching TNT to a piano on which the Road Runner, without ill effects, plays "Those Endearing Young Charms", aiming a solar-ray-magnifying glass at the mirror-holding Road Runner, and releasing a boulder that shears away the base of the narrow mesa atop of which he is standing. Rudy Larriva at Format Films next directed eleven additional Road Runner cartoons for DePatie-Freleng Enterprises to distribute to Warner Brothers, cartoons in which Wile E.'s schemes involved a chemistry set, a World War I airplane, a huge robot in his likeness, and a hot rod built from junk metal, plus such interesting ploys as an exploding telephone in a phoney bird sanctuary and a lightning rod disguised as a female Road Runner. McKimson followed the Larriva eleven with his second Road Runner cartoon, "Sugar and Spies" (1966), the last theatrical Road Runner film until the release of Jones' "Chariots of Fur" in 1995. In September, 1966, Wile E. and his elusive, highway-traversing prey appeared on Saturday morning network television in The Road Runner Show. Episodes of The Road Runner Show were opened and closed with a "groovy" song written by Barbara Cameron and performed by a vocal group, with difficult-to-understand lyrics rather like those on the classic Spiderman television series (1967-70). This was the same song that would be played after "This is It" on The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour. With the song, quick cuts from various Road Runner cartoons were shown. Some of the cartoons from which the cuts were extracted were "Run, Run, Sweet Road Runner" (Wile E. fluttering his eyebrows at the camera), "Tired and Feathered" (Wile E. shaking his head to mean "no" and the Road Runner releasing a lever to send Wile E. barreling down a hill on a stone log which crushes him against the rock formation at the base of the hill), "Highway Runnery" (Wile E.'s fan losing power just as he is about to clear a gorge on his wind sail), "Hip- Hip- Hurry!" (Wile E. being startled from behind him and between his legs by the beep-beeping Road Runner; Wile E. trying to sling-shot a dynamite stick, only to have it explode in his face), and "Wild About Hurry" (Wile E.'s rocket colliding with a rock). .Each episode of the 30-minute-long Road Runner Show that aired on CBS from September 10, 1966 to September 7, 1968, started with a Road Runner cartoon, many of which, directed by Larriva or by McKimson, had been completed and distributed to theatres just months earlier! Road Runner cartoons on The Road Runner Show were titled on red background, with Wile E. standing to the left of the title and looking schemingly at the Road Runner, who stood to the title's right. The same Road Runner and Wile E. poses were seen during the closing credits of every Road Runner Show. The second cartoon in each show featured Tweety Bird and Sylvester Cat, with each of their cartoons titled with a scene of Sylvester glancing from behind a tree at a running Tweety. Third and last was a cartoon with one or some of the following: Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., Hippety Hopper, Speedy Gonzales, Ralph Wolf, Sam Sheepdog, Pepe Le Pew, Foghorn Leghorn, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, canines Spike and Chester, Angelo the Mighty Flea, the Rum Cake-Eating Mouse, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny- and titled with a group of five characters (Foghorn Leghorn, Pepe Le Pew, Speedy Gonzales, Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd) arranged in a semi-circle. The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour (1968-71; 1975-8), CBS' Saturday morning successor to The Road Runner Show, would coopt most of the cartoons on The Road Runner Show, in addition to their title cards. A sponsor's identification would follow the theme song inaugurating each Road Runner Show, and clusters of commercials were positioned by CBS elsewhere in the episodes. And brief sequences with the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, animated specially for The Road Runner Show by the staff of DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, were inserted between cartoons one and two and between cartoons two and three of each episode. In these interstitial segments, Wile E. uses grenades with a tennis racket, a cannon, a red-nosed, wheeled robot, a rifle tied to a string, a rocket with an unreliable fuse, a Road Runner replica costume, a jet-powered car, a sketch of himself and of the Road Runner on an easel, a boulder dropped from a cliff above a water cooler, dynamite under two manhole covers, a telephone connected by a fuse to a huge TNT stick, a remote-controlled rocket that launches then descends explosively upon him, and a motorcycle that carries him up a hill to arrive on the underside of a precipice, from which he falls, demolishing the motorcycle. The Road Runner Show was superseded on CBS by The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour on September 14, 1968. Starting in September, 1971, The Road Runner Show was rerun on ABC in a reassembled form, with some trimming to remove Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf respectively smoking pipe and cigarette in "A Sheep in the Deep", the sound of Sylvester slapping his own face in "Snow Business", Foghorn Leghorn's quip about his cupboard being, "Bare as a cooch dancer's midriff," in "Strangled Eggs", and some of the consequences of Wile E. Coyote's failing schemes in the between-cartoon segments. Speculation is that some of these edits were done at some point in time during the 1968-71 CBS broadcast of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour. CBS' first episode of The Road Runner Show on September 10, 1966 contained "Zip N' Snort", "Hyde and Go Tweet", and "The Wild Chase". One of the episodes during The Road Runner Show's two years of transmission on CBS consisted of the cartoon shorts, "Sugar and Spies", "A Street Cat Named Sylvester", and "Birds of a Father". And the cartoons in the final Road Runner Show on CBS on September 7, 1968 were "Highway Runnery", "Fowl Weather", and "Don't Axe Me". |
