Here were some of the rules we obeyed in the Coyote–Road Runner series:
RULE 1. THE ROAD RUNNER CANNOT HARM THE COYOTE EXCEPT BY GOING “BEEP-BEEP!”
RULE 2. NO OUTSIDE FORCE CAN HARM THE COYOTE—ONLY HIS OWN INEPTITUDE OR THE FAILURE OF THE ACME PRODUCTS.
RULE 3. THE COYOTE COULD STOP ANYTIME—IF HE WERE NOT A FANATIC. (REPEAT: “A FANATIC IS ONE WHO REDOUBLES HIS EFFORT WHEN HE HAS FORGOTTEN HIS AIM.”—GEORGE SANTAYANA)
RULE 4. NO DIALOGUE EVER, EXCEPT “BEEP-BEEP!”
RULE 5. THE ROAD RUNNER MUST STAY ON THE ROAD—OTHERWISE, LOGICALLY, HE WOULD NOT BE CALLED ROAD RUNNER.
RULE 6. ALL ACTION MUST BE CONFINED TO THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT OF THE TWO CHARACTERS—THE SOUTHWEST AMERICAN DESERT.
RULE 7. ALL MATERIALS, TOOLS, WEAPONS, OR MECHANICAL CONVENIENCES MUST BE OBTAINED FROM THE ACME CORPORATION.
RULE 8. WHENEVER POSSIBLE, MAKE GRAVITY THE COYOTE’S GREATEST ENEMY.
RULE 9. THE COYOTE IS ALWAYS MORE HUMILIATED THAN HARMED BY HIS FAILURES.
The above are pertinent illustrations of the kind of thinking that went into the making of these films.
The Road Runner and Coyote cartoons are known and accepted throughout the world—perhaps the lack of dialogue is one reason. If you want to laugh, you can do so at any time, whether in Danish, French, Japanese, Urdu, Navajo, Eskimo, Portuguese, or Hindi. “Beep-Beep!” is the Esperanto of comedy.
I don’t suppose the Coyote ever actually left chocolaty paw prints on old Sears, Roebuck catalogues on the desert, but many years later Mike Maltese and I at least were able to supply him with the Acme catalogue.
While the Coyote had lurked somewhere in the cluttered back rooms of my mind ever since, at the age of seven, I read about this enchanting creature in Mark Twain’s Roughing It—just waiting for a chance to star—it wasn’t until I was more than grown that the opportunity came up. It was 1947 and the American animated short subject was preoccupied with the chase. Everyone seemed to be engaged in the pursuit of one another: Tom after Jerry; Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam after Bugs Bunny; Porky Pig after Daffy Duck; Bluto and Popeye having it out. So, as all writers and directors must have, Mike and I felt the call of Profundity. We would do a satire on chases, show up the shallowness of the whole concept, and become the Dean Swifts or H. L. Menckens of our day, be honored by learned societies, and probably welcomed at unemployment agencies nationwide.
The first Road Runner and Coyote cartoon, Fast and Furryous, was an absolute and dismal failure, as satire. And it was wholly and unexpectedly and undeservedly a success, as comedy. Robert Benchley said of Abie’s Irish Rose: “The public not only took the play to its bosom, it rubbed its bosom to a nubbin hugging it.”
“If you cannot lick ’em, join ’em.” A nice aphorism for the embarrassed parodist, so we gracefully accepted the kudos as though this had been our intent all the time, and lived happily with the Coyote and Road Runner ever after.
In animated cartoons, we do generally prefer animals to humans. First, if your story calls for human beings, use live action. It is cheaper, quicker, and more believable. If, as a director, I could train a live coyote and a live road runner to act, I would use them. I am an animator and an animation director; therefore, I look for characters that cannot be done in live action. That is what animation is all about; it is an extension beyond the ability of live-action motion pictures. Second, as said, it is easier to humanize animals than it is to humanize humans. We are far too close to other human beings; we are surrounded by human beings; we are subconsciously and consciously critical of other human beings according to how they deviate from our own behavior or from standards of behavior we approve of. Therefore, to many of us, everyone who looks like a cokehead is a cokehead. Everyone who looks like a bum is a bum. But, if so, what about the talent of Theodore Dreiser, who looked like an unmade bed? If all wimpy-looking people are wimps, what about Woody Allen?
It is in order to avoid these stereotypes that animators, as well as Aesop, Kipling, La Fontaine, E. B. White, Beatrix Potter, Felix Salten, Walt Kelly, and countless other writers, turn to animals. People look at rabbits or ducks or bears as a class rather than as individuals, though it is true we stereotype those classes. We classify all snakes as repulsive or dangerous, when fewer than one snake in a million can or will harm us. We are revolted by spiders, when most spiders are beneficial to mankind and only one spider in a million is harmful to man, and then, like the snake, only if provoked.
Mysterious pipe: SOUP OR SONIC, episode from BUGS BUNNY’S BUSTIN’ OUT ALL OVER (CBS-TV, 1980)
Working against those stereotypes, animation directors and writers have attempted to explode human prejudices: E. B. White’s heroine in Charlotte’s Web was a spider; one of Rudyard Kipling’s heroes in The Jungle Book was a thirty-foot python who loved a small boy, not as an hors d’oeuvre but as a friend. Bugs Bunny grew into a comic hero with the kind of human characteristics we admire and laugh with, because no one would expect a rabbit to have any personality at all. After all, rabbits are rabbits, aren’t they? Just as with Daffy Duck, a wimpy duck with the ego of a Stallone—come now, ducks quack, that’s about it with ducks. How about Pepé Le Pew? A skunk with an overwhelming confidence in his own desirability?
From Bob McKimson’s Foghorn Leghorn series
Everyone knows what a pussycat most pussycats are, yet Sylvester Cat is a poltroon, a fanatic, a graceless boor, cunning in an awkward way and a terrible
