Lesser Chuck Jones Road Runner & Coyote short that's still better than all of the stuff that came after Jones left the series. The animation is solid, if not particularly exceptional. The colors are kind of dull, which is odd for the time. I thought maybe it was just the print I saw off TV but I checked out the DVD version and it appears to be the same there. As other reviewers have mentioned, the one notable gag involves a piano. The rest are pretty forgettable gags involving hammers, dynamite, and bird seed. What hurts the cartoon most of all is the canned music score, which is annoying and below the superior quality of the usual composers who worked in WB animation.

After creating the two best episodes in the entire "Road Runner" series ("Zoom & Bored" and "Whoa Be-Gone"), I guess it was inevitable that creator Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese were due for a less-than-stellar go-round in Episode #13 of the series. It wasn't helped by the fact there was a musicians strike on at the time, so the music used was basically commercial-production music -- including a melody that was later used (slightly altered) as the theme song for the "Dennis The Menace" TV show. The gags in this episode seem a bit forced, and only a few really stand out as being genuinely funny, such as the bundle of dynamite that chases Wile E back to his hiding place and the grand piano that he somehow decides would be the perfect weapon to squash Road Runner with! This is probably my least-favorite episode of the series -- at least until after Chuck Jones left WB and it became shadow of itself 1960s.

...but Hook, Line and Stinker is not what I consider a favourite. The animation is not too bad, it is solid enough, some of the gags are decent namely the piano gag and the overall quality when watching it on TV or DVD is nice. Also Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote's antics are reasonably funny. However, the running time is disappointingly scant, and I found the pacing rather hectic. But the most disappointing asset was the music. These Looney Tunes usually have great music, with quirky motifs and rousing rhythms, but here I(a musician myself) found the music, as others have pointed out, annoying and repetitive.Overall, not bad, but not great either. 6/10 Bethany Cox

No matter how many times Wile Ethelbert "Famishius Famishius" Coyote tries to get Road "Burnius Roadibus" Runner, we always know what's going to happen, though our sympathy always remains with WEC. The highlight in "Hook, Line and Stinker" is a Rube Goldberg-style scheme that WEC hopes will finally finish off RR; but of course you know what happens.So, Wile E. continues hilarious engaging in fanaticism (defined by George Santayana as redoubling your effort after you've forgotten your aim) while Road Runner pretty much never becomes aware of the potential danger - or lack thereof - in which he could find himself. A real classic.And yes, the coyote's middle name is Ethelbert. I learned that from "Jeopardy!".