FERB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)

By: Mandy Keifetz
January 21, 2021

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite animated TV series.

ROAD RUNNER | CHUCK JONES | 1949–ONGOING

In order to re-view all the classic Road Runners on the last evening of 2020 in this strange global moment, as was my plan, one must, it turns out, rent them from the Deranged Supplier of All Things — a matter I will return to presently.

According to director Chuck Jones, he and his team intended with their first Road Runner (“Fast and Furry-ous,” Sept. 17, 1949) a satire of the chase cartoons of the era. Instead, and I think by accident, they created a satire of human nature: hungry, always scheming, easily obsessed, distractable, eternally seduced by technology, and always failing.

Wile E. Coyote pursues Road Runner across a sparse Sonoran landscape. In the opening frame, he usually has a knife and trident fork (which my daughter calls a “threek.”) But if his initial impulse is to eat the Road Runner, by the second shot he wishes only to destroy it. With increasingly overdetermined schemes, he plots to pulverize, explode, and run off the tops of mesas, the Road Runner.

He presumably orders — but we only ever see the delivered boxes — from a company called Acme in Fairfield, N.J., a fantastic array of ludicrous things; and with these, devises increasingly maniacal Road Runner traps, all of which fail. Instead, he ensnares himself. From Acme, in any given short, he might employ Acme Bird Seed, Acme Burmese Tiger Trap, Acme Female Road Runner Costume, Acme Giant Kite Kit, or, say, Acme Leg Muscle Vitamins and of course Acme TNT. Even now, this is funny because it seems absurd, that a company might sell so many different things, and air drop them into the Sonoran desert mid-chase.

The Road Runner, for his part, simply blows by. Sometimes he sticks out his tongue, his feet a blurry cloud. He says only, and it is the only thing ever said, “meep-meep” — by which he means, unmistakably, eat my dust. Wile E. Coyote invariably ends up in his own trap, pulverized, flattened, singed, smoking; but mostly just humiliated. (Above all, though, he is undeterred.)

Owing to the perversities of my youth, I had, as a rule identified with the Road Runner during my initial viewings of these cartoons. I was a slavish devotee of outrunning my problems, and having no particular tools at hand, made use of whatever cliffs, gravity, and native weaknesses of my foes were convenient when forward momentum proved insufficient.

I remember this clearly, but can no longer feel it. In middle age, in a racist plague dystopia, trapped in my home, unable to make my habitual obeisance to forward momentum, I am Wile E. Coyote’s bitch. Scheming maniacally, failing spectacularly, with no clear markers for the passage of space or time. He is, at least, never mopey about it, and this too I have tried to follow.

I think this a natural and healthy evolution for me, from road runner to coyote, and I’ve no plan to fight it. But having spent the last night of this strange year rewatching all the Road Runners, which I purchased from the Deranged Supplier of All Things, I have come up with a scheme for 2021:

Be of good cheer in the face of your disasters. And boycott Acme.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

FERB YOUR ENTHUSIASM (7)

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