Studio: Warner Bros. Cartoons
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Short Synopsis
Wile E. Coyote is so hungry that he is cooking a tin can, seasoning it, and sitting down to carve it like a steak before he realises what he is doing and kicks the whole table setting away. A freeze-frame identifies him: "Coyote, Eatibus almost anythingus". The Road Runner, "Velocitus delectiblus", blasts past with a "beep-beep", and Wile E. gives chase, only to watch the bird vanish over the horizon in a few frames. Then come the schemes. He fits an arrowhead to his nose and fires himself from a bow, and spears a saguaro cactus that falls off a cliff. He loads himself into a slingshot, but it won't fire until he peers at the string. He lights a cannon, and the cannon fires itself backwards, with him aboard, into a rock face, then fires a second ball into his face. A boulder on a rope swings back at him. Each plan fails in a new way, and the film ends, as they all do, with the Road Runner beeping away and the Coyote defeated.
Why It Matters
- The film shows the Road Runner series' formula at its purest: no dialogue, a desert stage, a sequence of self-contained gags, and the Coyote's dignity collapsing with each failure. Chuck Jones's timing, the pause before every fall and the freeze-frame Latin names, became one of the most imitated comic styles in animation.
- It is an early Road Runner cartoon, from the series Jones and writer Michael Maltese began in 1949 with Fast and Furry-ous, and one of the films that established the series' unwritten rules: the Coyote is always the victim of his own devices, and the Road Runner never harms him directly.
Notes and Trivia
- The cannon gag, in which the weapon fires the opposite way, is one of the series' best-known variations on the backfiring device.
- The Road Runner's speed is described in the film as Mach 225, crossing the horizon in five frames.
- See also: A Wild Hare (1940), What's Opera, Doc? (1957).