Beep Beep
- Madeleine Mendell
- May 12, 2015
- 3 min read
Roadrunner & Wile E. Coyote, “Chariots of Fur” – Chuck Jones – Looney Tunes – 1994
Chuck Jones’s nine rules for this segment of Looney Tunes were:
The road runner cannot harm the coyote except by going “beep-beep!”
No outside force can harm the coyote – only his own ineptitude or the failure of the ACME products.
The coyote could stop anytime – if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: “A fanatic is one who redoubles his efforts when he has forgotten his aim.” – George Santayana)
No dialogue ever, except “beep-beep!”
The road runner must stay on the road – otherwise, logically, he would not be called road runner.
All action must be confine to the natural environment of the two characters – the Southwest American desert.
All materials, tools, weapons, or mechanical convenience must be obtained from the ACME corporation.
Whenever possible, make gravity the coyote’s greatest enemy.
The coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
By setting these rules for himself and his fellow animators, Chuck Jones outlines how to use the violence in this comedic situation. In a show meant for kids, there can be no gory or permanent repercussions for Wile E. Coyote. Still, Jones had to create an atmosphere where, even though we know that the coyote will fail spectacularly in some way, shape, or form, we want to keep watching his self-destruction. In “Chariots of Fur,” the coyote employs a giant mouse trap, an instant road, a cactus costume, and even a lightning bolt in attempts to catch the road runner.
Even though there are no repercussions for Wile E. Coyote, the violence is not diminished and is still the main vehicle for comedy. What happens when violence has no repercussions? Does it become reduced to just another way of communicating hilarity across the screen? There are still moments in “Chariots of Fur” when we wince at Wile E. Coyote’s failures, but that reaction stems more from cringing at his humiliation than from empathizing with the violence enacted on Wile E. Coyote.
In taking from Jones’ list of rules for the show, we can see that there are several main vehicles for the comedy: roadrunner is a passive player who does nothing but run and say “beep-beep,” but that “beep-beep” becomes another source of humiliation for Wile E. Coyote; all the devices come from ACME, which becomes a running joke of mail order devices that never work making us wonder what strange invention ACME will come up with next; and, as previously stated, Wile E. Coyote’s only source of harm is through his humiliation, but because of his fanaticism, he always bounces back.
The conflation of humiliation and extreme violence is an interesting aspect to contemplate when regarding this as a children’s show. Failure is worse than death, at that point, and although we all love to see Wile E. Coyote fail every time he is on screen, perhaps his humiliation does a disservice to persistent pursuit of a problem. There comes in the fanaticism. We assume that Wile E. Coyote is hungering for some roadrunner, and that is why he goes after the bird. Yet in “Chariots of Fur,” Wile E. Coyote employs a lightning bolt that we see disintegrate a cactus. At that point, Coyote has lost sight of the reason for his pursuit, and as detailed in the quote used by Jones, it is in that respect that his humiliation becomes all the more hilarious.
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