A lot of us should be able to remember the adventures, or misadventures, of Wile E. Coyote and his nemesis, the fleet-footed Roadrunner. These two were a big part of the Looney Tunes and actually helped to revive it in a way back in the 70s. But somewhere along the way the Looney Tunes stared losing ground to other cartoons and even becoming an outdated concept as sensitivity and attention to the actual harm the coyote was doing to himself came to mar the otherwise hilarious nature of the cartoon. Realists tend to wreck a lot of things when they start saying how things would go and should go, but cartoons seemed to be sacrosanct for a long time. The main reason was because they were cartoons, they could take an ungodly amount of physical punishment and just keep coming. The whole idea of a cartoon was that you could watch them be beaten to a pulp and in the next frame they’d get up, dust themselves off, and go right back at it.
But then there were stories of kids trying to emulate the cartoons and hurting themselves in the process, so the natural reaction of parents that either weren’t watching their children or hadn’t informed them somehow and in some way that human bodies couldn’t accomplish such feats was to sue whoever was responsible for making the cartoons. Fortunately a lot of these stories that have been told are more for the cautionary purpose of not allowing kids to watch these cartoons since suing Warner Bros. for the Looney Tunes and their antics would make for greater comedy than some of the cartoons. But among the lot of them there’s no doubt that Wile E. Coyote took some of the heaviest damage. The worst part is that he did a lot of it to himself. But getting past that, the idea of a cartoon promoting destruction and imminent death still didn’t sit well with a lot of people and seemed to indicate that our values were going down the toilet.
And yet look at where we’re at now. We have cartoons that feature a talking sponge that uses mindless sexual innuendo and have had cartoons like Ren and Stimpy, Beavis and Butthead, and even Family Guy that kids watch and think is great. And the problem with violence in these cartoons has been addressed, but it’s been let go just as it was with the Looney Tunes for so long. The dynamic between Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner was a classic story since it never seemed to end. The Roadrunner was either too fast or somehow too clever for the coyote and evaded so many traps or outwitted the coyote that one had to wonder when Wile was going to finally give up and why he hadn’t starved to death yet.
Because he was a CARTOON.
That’s the whole point here and one of the biggest reasons why it should be brought back. In fact if you want an honest to goodness opinion the whole lot of them should be brought back in their original form and with voices that can match those that made them famous. There’s no shortage of voice actors that would likely love to take a crack at producing such iconic voices for a Looney Tunes show, a regular show, not a movie starring Brendan Fraser that won’t get any real play and be forgotten only a month after its release. The idea of resurrecting the Roadrunner cartoons would be something that a lot of people might be interested in since now there’s more than one way to bring them to the people. Streaming Looney Tunes would be a great idea since a fan could take them anywhere and watch them any time.
Plus, if you’ve ever watched that poor, deluded coyote ram into a wall, the ground, or any other solid surface that presents itself, then you start to feel a little better about your life since things are going pretty well for you considering. In other words this cartoon isn’t just about the violence that’s done to the coyote, it’s about the ability of the show to make a person laugh and just forget about their problems for a while as they fall into the easy rhythm of watching Wile fail again and again and again as he tries and tries without success to finally reach the object of his desire. One of the biggest reasons why he never caught the Roadrunner is that the show would have been over and, honestly, it would have been a little too dark even for Looney Tunes.
Bringing this show back would do more than just give us a nostalgic wink from the past, it would remind kids that the cartoons they watch now did in fact have a much humbler and funnier band of predecessors.
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