Again the cartoon does not take itself seriously. As you have to not take yourself seriously in order to watch a cartoon like both the Roadrunner and the Wile E Coyote.At first the Coyote tries to take matter into his own hands. As Coyote later learns that he can't just do it all by himself as the bird proves to be fast and clever from time and time again.So he of course revolts to the now famous and infamous depending on your own opinion, Acme company. Which is now and has been a trademark for the Coyote to fail.Always funny but sad in a way to see Wile E get knocked around and just beaten while trying to get the Roadrunner as his prey.

I like these opening graphics which give us various "scientific names" of the two main characters. This time, the roadrunner - who is shown outracing a fast train - is labeled "velocitus tremenjus." Wile E. Coyote, watching from above, is now labeled "Road Runnerus Digestus."Wile E.'s slapstick attempts at getting the bird include a hand grenade, mousetraps, a giant kite with a big bomb, falling telephone poles, bird seed with steel shot and a giant magnet, hypnotism, a giant boulder, shotguns and more! It's unbelievable how many attempts the coyote makes in each cartoon with the predictable results.This wasn't one of the funnier episodes, I didn't think, although it was entertaining as always.

The life of a predator isn't what it's cracked up to be! He must be up to his eyeballs in debt to Acme (or has a sizable source of funds), his medical bills equally large and for what? A singular lack of success in catching one bird! I say give up, get a pizza and take up stamp collecting. Great fun and worth watching. Recommended.

It's strange how your perspective shifts as you get older. When I was a young devotee of ROADRUNNER, it was the titular hero I identified with, his speed, obviously, his unassailability, his grace, his freedom, his cheek. Watching him again, nearly two decades on, I find that the real hero of the cartoon is not this miraculous popinjay, but his hapless nemesis, Wil E. Coyote.There is something monstrous and inhuman about Roadrunner's indestructability, but nothing heroic. He is a creature of instinct, he is what he is, a road runner. We should no more applaud his skill than we should marvel at rain falling. Even his mockery seems mechanical, unwilled. He is something abstract, ungraspable, a hurtling metaphor for all we fail to achieve in life.Wil E. we can love, identify with. He has a name. Like all self-willed names, it is preposterously inappropriate. Although part of his failure can be attributed to his enemy's fleet feet, it is his ineptitude that is mostly to blame. His wily schemes are incompetently conceived in the heat of the moment - the eternal chase allows no room for pause.These cartoons are a further elaboration of Buster Keaton's Beckettian agonies - here plot is completely abandoned, for a daring, perpetual repetition, where closure is forever denied. Because the only closure could be death - Road Runner's, Wil E.'s, or ours. We will never pin down that which we can sense, but cannot hold. And yet we must continued to try, because stillness can only lead to thoughts of mortality and despair.Chuck Jones' imagination only improves with age. The Cezanne-like geometrics are a marvel to behold. The saturated colours still dazzle, and the backgrounds, part simplistic children's book illustration, part bleak dreamscape, are as piercingly evocative as ever. The insane and complex variations on what is essentially a simple, inexorable plot are breathtaking, and puts almost everything that was stumbling lamely out of Hollywood at the time to shame. Jones, horribly underrated, was at least as great a director as Keaton, Hawks or Sirk, and it is about time we said so. So I did.