You’ve got to hand it to Wile E Coyote. For a relatively one-note character and set-up (coyote tracks roadrunner, always fails), his legacy as a put-upon antagonist has transcended decades. First seen way back in 1949 in the three-minute short Fast and Furry-ous, the Looney Tunes joke is so simple but timeless.
There’s something earnest about Wile E though. His desperation and commitment to capturing this creature — despite constantly failing — is endearing (in its own predatory way). The simplicity of the slapstick humor seen in that very first cartoon (to then be repeated ten-fold), which you can watch below, doesn’t require anything else to work.
But what kept the cartoon fresh was its gadgets. What would a new week bring? What incredible (albeit ultimately dysfunctional) contraption would bring Wile E’s downfall this time? Talking to Wired to promote his dedicated ACME-themed piece, artist Rob Loukotka says: “[The Road Runner V. Wile E] plots absolutely depended on the ACME Corporation, and I’d argue that’s where we all remember most ACME products from.”
Coyote vs. ACME
Warner Bros.
In that aforementioned art piece detailing (more or less) all the ACME products bought and received over the course of the OG Looney Tunes run (spanning a whole 43 years), Loukotka details 126 different items. In the same piece for Wired, Loukotka added: “The ACME Corporation is essentially a dream factory.”
Like the complete opposite of James Bond, someone who can rely on state-of-the-art watches and spy gear to get out of any life or death scenario, Wile E is but a poor consumer time and again, relying on products that were either faulty in the first place or just can’t keep up with the matter at hand (in this case, a lightning fast roadrunner).
Be it a giant slingshot, rocket, roller skates, boomerangs, magnets, hand grenades, or winged bat suit, the ACME corporation was always on hand and ready to deliver immediately to a desolate desert for this long-serving customer to meet his needs. The conglomerate’s relationship to its wily consumer is even being depicted in the upcoming film Coyote vs. ACME, an apt title if ever there was one.
Starring John Cena, the film finds a disgruntled Wile E Coyote suing the ACME corporation for civil and criminal negligence under Title 15, Chapter 47 of the United States Code. With that being said, let’s explore the cruelty of capitalism and the way company’s profit off of desire, failure, and emptiness as expressed in the Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner cartoons.
Money Makes the World Go Round
Havahart (ironically, a corporation that specializes in humane animal trapping) published a wonderfully detailed piece on Wile E’s spending habits across the original series. It reads:
For sobering clarity, they continued:
By our estimation, in today’s market, Coyote would have spent more than $7,000 on anvils, bombs, traps, and props manufactured by ACME in his attempts to catch the Road Runner over the course of the show’s history. In episode 15, “Hot-Rod and Reel!” the Coyote probably spent over $2,600 on two jet-propelled items: a unicycle and a pogo stick.
Faulty Goods of an Evil ACME
ACME, a makeweight company title used throughout the Looney Tunes universe and beyond, became synonymous with American branding and the yellow pages in the ’20s (as its name is often alphabetically listed first). Originating from Greek (“akme” meaning something’s zenith — the best something can be), in Wile E’s world, the ACME brand was a slinky corporation more than happy to deliver whatever its customer desired and in no time at all, with no questions asked.
We also wanted to determine just how much Coyote would have spent purchasing each ACME product. To do this, we used online retailers to determine an estimated or average cost. Obviously, estimating the costs of “exploding tennis balls” and “jet-propelled skis” is a little ambiguous – when doing this, we added the average price of a tennis ball to the average cost of common fireworks, or we looked at the cost increase for “jet-propelled” items versus their counterparts, such as a kayak versus a jet-propelled kayak.
Forget next-day delivery, ACME could deliver within the same scene in a big wooden crate dropped to the middle of nowhere. Looney Tunes creator Chuck Jones elaborated on the origins of the fictional brand in the short film Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood:
Often nothing more than merely a checklist in-joke for fans, putting the trademark registered company under the microscope shows that ACME only lends itself to the dark side of capitalism and big business. In various ways, but most especially in its relationship with Wile E Coyote, ACME is used to explore the ways in which shady companies are always more than ready to profit off people’s unhealthy desires, and often create them in the first place.
Since we had to search out our own entertainment, we devised our own fairy stories. If you wanted a bow and arrow, you got a stick. If you wanted to conduct an orchestra, you got a stick. If you wanted a duel, you used a stick. You couldn’t go and buy one. That’s where the term acme came from. Whenever we played a game where we had a grocery store or something, we called it the ACME corporation. Why? Because in the yellow pages if you looked, say, under drugstores, you’d find the first one would be Acme Drugs. Why? Because “ac” was about as high as you could go. It means the best, the superlative.
Wile E Coyote and ACME Corporate Inaction
In 2003’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action, the ACME corporation is run by Mr. Chairman (Steve Martin in perhaps his worst performance, with Cheaper by the Dozen and The Pink Panther nearby), who was positioned as the flat-out villain in charge of a downright evil company.
Seeing dollar signs in place of both pupils, the drive of the ACME corporation in the film is to gain the Blue Monkey diamond (a jewel with the ability to transform people into monkeys), hoping to turn humanity into “monkey slaves” to manufacture “shoddy ACME goods.” Of course, the further goal was to then turn them back into humans again, so they can then purchase the very same items back.
It should be noted that Wile E Coyote has been taken on as an employee and agent under ACME in this film, and when introduced his character is met with groans by the fellow ACME board members. Before being blown up for the final time in the film, Wile E presents a placard to the audience reading: “They don’t pay me enough.”
This predatory relationship between the working consumer and the profiting company will be explored in the Coyote vs. ACME film, which is loosely based on a 1990 parody piece from The New Yorker by Ian Frazier. The story positioned Mr. Coyote as suing the ACME company for damages to the combined total of $38,750,000. One scathing section reads:
The Customer is Always Right
While the basic predator versus prey setup is the main drive here, it’s underlined not by a case of retail therapy for this creature, but an addiction perhaps to the latest product — despite its blatantly few improvements. Wile E continues to buy gadgets which are sold as ways to catch the roadrunner; despite each failure, he keeps purchasing, imagining that eventually one product will prevail.
As the Court is no doubt aware, Defendant has a virtual monopoly of manufacture and sale of goods required by Mr. Coyote’s work. It is our contention that Defendant has used its market advantage to the detriment of the consumer of such specialized products as itching powder, giant kites, Burmese tiger traps, anvils, and two-hundred-foot-long rubber bands. Much as he has come to mistrust Defendant’s products, Mr. Coyote has no other domestic source of supply to which to turn. One can only wonder what our trading partners in Western Europe and Japan would make of such a situation, where a giant company is allowed to victimize the consumer in the most reckless and wrongful manner over and over again.
Of course, ACME, like any other company, does not want Wile E to think about what would happen when he actually catches the roadrunner, that silent, speeding symbol of desire. One of the few times Wile E Coyote does catch up to the roadrunner, he turns to the camera and holds up signs reading, “Okay wise guys, you always wanted me to catch him. Now what do I do?” This could illustrate the elusive truth of desire and its profitability — that we don’t actually want what we want, we just want to want it. Getting what you want is often terrible, because you realize that it ultimately didn’t change much. There is no job, vacation, or person that, once we ‘get’ it, makes us complete and lets us live happily ever after.
Wile E is like that viral video of the kid from Australia queuing all night to have the brand new IPhone 6… and then dropping the device as soon as he opened the box. Wile E, crushed under a boulder, is both the young boy camping overnight for the new issue and the cracked screen itself. In fact, the boulder imagery (used throughout the cartoons) positions Wile E as a modern Sisyphus, doomed to repeatedly pursue something only for it to fail time and time again.
As one philosophical meme puts it, paraphrasing the Albert Camus text The Myth of Sisyphus, “one must imagine Wile E Coyote happy,” and if he were to just give up on his pursuit of the roadrunner he could have saved enough money to settle down, look at a career, date, maybe even start a family of Coyotes. They could vacation. Perhaps, finally, Wile E would stop paying to chase after impossible things, as we all do.
Rooting For Coyote in a World of ACMEs
And yet, Wile E Coyote can’t resist returning again and again for this futile endeavor, all while supported by underperforming technology. Fast on his own, but constantly clawing at air for something always just out of reach. Incapable of speech, and therefore no voice applicable to ever question or complain about his monopolizing masters either (except from those weird few times when Wile actually did talk…).
With the Coyote vs. ACME movie (co-written and co-produced by Guardians of the Galaxy mastermind James Gunn with writers of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) on the way, Wile E’s ongoing pursuits vs big business are as relevant as they’ve ever been. If Wile E is to win his court case against ACME Co. then it will be a win for the working man (or working coyote in this case), and perhaps make enough of a dent in public perception and pay-outs to have the company close their doors and admit, finally, “That’s all folks!”
