Tuesday, 21 August 2018

Rule 1 is Broken

Mike Maltese’s end gag in Going! Going! Gosh! (released in 1952): the Coyote swings at the Roadrunner to skewer him with a javelin. He hear a “beep, beep!” Down he comes. The frames explain what happened next. I love the little trucks floating around the Coyote’s head.



It turns out the roadrunner is driving the truck.



Hey, wait a minute! Chuck Jones insisted Rule 1 of the Roadrunner/Coyote series was “The Roadrunner cannot harm the Coyote except by going ‘Beep-Beep!’” (Chuck Amuck, pg. 225). Oh, right. He made these up long after he stopped making the cartoons. Or, to paraphrase Maltese, “What rules?”
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4 comments:

  1. Ricardo Cantoral21 August 2018 at 12:06

    I think it was easy to believe such rules existed because Jones always imposed a very rigid structure to his cartoons.

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  2. J Lee21 August 2018 at 13:43

    You also had the metal shield the Road Runner held up to smash Wile E. in in the very first effort, and they really violated Chuck's 'rules' in one of the later RRs Maltese did, 1958's "Hip! Hip! Hurry!", where the Road Runner not only stops the Coyote at the spot of the dynamite in the road until the burning fuse reaches there, but also trips him at the end of the thing to cause him to roll into the dynamite shed.

    So as a rule, its funnier when Wile E. does himself in, or the forces of cartoon nature conspire to do him in. But you could almost do an entire six-minute short filled with gags from all of Jones' cartoons where the Road Runner actively does something to thwart the Coyote.

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  3. top_cat_james21 August 2018 at 14:18

    Jones violated his own rules even AFTER the theatrical shorts had long ended. In his "Freeze Frame" segment for the Bugs Bunny's Looney Christmas Tales TV special in 1979, rules No. 5 and 6 are broken ("The Road Runner must stay on the road -- for no other reason than that he's a roadrunner" and "All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters -- the southwest American desert.", respectively). I remember watching when it premiered and thinking, "Wait a minute..."

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  4. Ray K.21 August 2018 at 17:10

    Chuck Jones did preen a bit in his last years, in the pre-DVD commentary days’ version of the preening we hear on filmmakers’ commentary tracks—and he got a little indulgent in interviews and especially when he wrote about his accomplishments. The good news is he manifestly put ample thought and craft into his best work, and gave us plenty of it—so he earned his vanities better than most!

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