Adventures of the Road Runner

Beginning life as a failed TV pilot, Adventures of the Road Runner was eventually released as a theatrical short, before finally getting chopped up into three further shorts. Taken individually, everything here is a wonderful piece of animation, filled with smart gags and a frantic go-go-go pacing. All of it taken together without the benefit of commercial breaks leaves a certain feeling of a padded out running time.

This becomes most obvious when the Adventures of the Road Runner goes meta-textual in its humor. We pull back to see that the cartoons we’re watching are part of a TV show watched by two young boys. One of them is Ralph from “From A to Z-Z-Z-Z,” a little daydreamer with a rich imaginary life, and the other his unnamed friend who tries to psychoanalyze him. This leads to “From A to Z-Z-Z-Z” being spliced into the proceedings as an example of Ralph’s inability to concentrate leading him to identify with the Road Runner’s constant buzzing about.

“From A to Z-Z-Z-Z” is an absolute delight, a charming blast into an elementary school child’s fervid imagination, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the exploits of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. It’s inclusion feels like narrative padding, try as the writer’s might to throw in a reason behind it.

Where Adventures of the Road Runner excels is in the newly created shorts. The revelation that Wile E. Coyote videotapes all of his exploits with the Road Runner in an effort to strategize and analyze weaknesses in his plans is a fun joke, sold by Mel Blanc’s tongue-in-cheek egg headed vocal intonations for Wile E. Coyote.  The presence of reused footage from older cartoons feels more organic here, and the effect overall works far better.

The gag where the Road Runner barrels across a bridge so fast he warps it in his wake, dragging several cacti along for the ride, and setting up a bit of physical violence-as-punchline that the Looney Tunes do so damn well is a solid chuckler. This is what can be said for this elaborately constructed collage-as-TV pilot as a whole work. It’s filled with solid chuckles that the film-makers know how to do well, it’s just a shame that the middle feels unnecessarily padded out with extraneous bits that don’t fit in with the whole.