Road Runner

I’ve sort of given up on Warner Bros. DVD releases of its cartoons: I accept that we’re not going to get much of value until a) Blu-Ray becomes popular enough to spawn some Looney Tunes collections in that format, or b) That elusive, often-promised set of the “Censored 11” shorts finally becomes a reality. (There’s also online streaming, but frankly, while I want to see more older material in that format, I want to own good-quality copies, and always will. But that’s another post.) But I had to say something about This Road Runner/Coyote DVD they’re releasing, where the selection is so bad that it seems like a joke. But it has been confirmed as real.

This counts as a TV post because many of us grew up watching these things on TV: I am reminded that this is the 60th anniversary of the very first Road Runner cartoon (which was released to theatres on September 17, 1949). Nobody really thought that “Fast and Furry-ous” would be the start of a long-running series; Chuck Jones intended it as a sort of reducto ad absurdum of all the “chase” cartoons that were proliferating at the time, almost a self-parody of the rituals and rules that go into making a cartoon like this. Of course it caught on and became the pilot for a popular series that we all loved because it was so formulaic, and because the only question in every scene was just how the Coyote would fail. And from the very first film, most of the elements were in place: the fake Latin names, the “meep-meep” voice provided by background artist Paul Julian, and even the choice of a dance from Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride as the theme song.