Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones / Remembering singer Cassandra Wilson

David Bianculli (0:00)

This is Fresh Air, I'm TV critic David Bianculli. At this point, the Looney Tunes cartoon franchise has been around for almost a century. Warner Bros launched the first cartoon under that name in 1930 and spent the next several decades supplying cinemas and then television with animated shorts that delighted adults as well as kids. The animators, who over the years included Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Fritz Freeling and Chuck Jones, were brilliantly funny. So was Mel Blank, who provided the voices for almost all of the characters, from Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to Elmer Fudd and Pepe Liphew.

Composer Carl Stalling supplied the memorable music for many episodes, and the combined canon included such 1950s classics as The Rabbit of Seville and What's Opera, Doc? Both of which were directed by Jones with music by Stalling and voices by Blank.

These cartoons and characters were widely adored by several generations, including mine. A streak of anarchy and a lot of violence ran through most of them. But as comedian Dustin Nickerson observed recently after trying to introduce these classic cartoons to his young daughter, they haven't necessarily aged well. More than a few characters have speech impediments, he notes, and lots of them exhibit very aggressive behavior.

SPEAKER_4 (1:24)

Okay, you don't like that?

Justin Chang (1:25)

Well, check it out, there's this skunk.

SPEAKER_4 (1:33)

She goes, what's he doing? He holds women against their will. Yeah, they try and get away, but Pepe won't let them, uh-uh.

David Bianculli (1:45)

And all the other characters, what they're doing is they're trying to kill one another. You know how in your shows, they're all friends? They're not in these ones, they're trying to murder one another.

There's this coyote who wants to kill this bird. The Looney Tunes franchise also got little respect from Warner Bros. itself. A few years ago, the studio, under new corporate management, shelved a completed movie, Coyote vs. ACME, before its release as a financial write-off. The film comedy was based on a 1990 New Yorker article by Ian Frazier, who imagined a lawsuit filed by lawyers representing one of the familiar Looney Tunes cartoon characters, Wile E. Coyote. Said Coyote, of course, is the persistent but hapless predator who was in constant feudal pursuit of his fleet-footed quarry, the Roadrunner. The Coyote never succeeded in his efforts, despite devising endless schemes employing rocket skates, spring-powered shoes, and other devices purchased from the ACME company.

As his lawyers alleged in that New Yorker parody piece, quote, Mr. Coyote states that on 85 separate occasions, he has purchased of the ACME company, here and after defendant, through that company's mail-order department, certain products which did cause him bodily injury due to defects in manufacture or improper cautionary labeling, unquote. The film version intermingled cartoon and human characters, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with the animated Wile E. Coyote sharing the same screen as his human lawyer, played by Will Forte. The Coyote hires the lawyer after seeing him on a low rent TV ad, the kind of small screen huckstering Bob Odenkirk's sleazy lawyer, Saul Goodman used to do on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

SPEAKER_4 (3:37)

Have you ever sat a big stack of TNT on the road, hoping to blow up your nemesis, but the detonator itself explodes?

Have you ever pulled the ripcord of your parachute and only a bunch of silverware comes out? It's not your fault. ACME is evil.

David Bianculli (3:55)

It's a very clever, very funny movie, but was buried deep in the Warner Bros. Discovery vaults until it was rescued this year by an independent distributor which purchased the rights for $50 million and finally released it in theaters last month. Coyote vs. ACME, written by Sammy Birch and directed by Dave Green, has been shown in relatively few theaters nationwide, but already has made almost all that money back in the US as well as an additional $30 million worldwide. Both the movie plot and the film's history are delightful stories of perseverance. So today on Fresh Air, we're saluting Coyote vs. ACME and the long cartoon history it celebrates by listening back to an interview with Looney Tunes animator, Chuck Jones.

The cartoon that introduced the Roadrunner and his nemesis, Wile E. Coyote, was Fast and Furious in 1949 It was directed by Chuck Jones and introduced the running gag that recurred ever since. The Coyote ordering mail order merchandise to try and ultimately fail to catch the elusive Roadrunner. In later cartoons, that company was identified as ACME, which promptly delivered the faulty goods. That inspired the New Yorker article that inspired the movie Coyote vs. ACME. And in a way, Chuck Jones with his ACME idea also might be said to have inspired the entire rapid delivery concept of today's real life equivalent, Amazon. Chuck Jones worked at Warner Bros. from 1933 until the studio closed down its cartoon division in 1963 He then formed his own production company and kept producing and directing until his death in 2002