About six or seven years ago, in a flash of either inspiration or madness, I experienced an insight into the Roadrunner cartoon. Why there is no dialog, the Roadrunner has virtually no personality, and Wile E. just persists with this monomaniacal quest, when, considering he spends an average of about $30,000 on gadgets in every cartoon, you have to wonder why he doesn't just order an Acme pizza.

It seemed to me in this luminous moment of clarity that the Roadrunner represented the implacable forces of the universe and entropy, and the Coyote represents humanity's need to persist in the face of it, even though it's utlimately futile.

Looking back, I still think I had something there.

This isn't the best or the worst Roadrunner cartoon, but taken as a series they sort of achieve a higher grade than most of the shorts do individually.

As with virtually all the RR shorts, this is a collection of rapid fire spot gags, which vary from predictable to hilarious (and occaisionally both at once). Outlining the plot seems futile. You all know what's involved. Wile E. tries to catch Roadrunner with a series of elaborate plans and mail-order gadgets, and they all fail (though what he was actually trying to do with the Batman costume, other than provide a rather iconic visual moment, I don't know).

The best spots for me are probably where the punchline is withdrawn, implied or hidden. For example, the battleship armour which Wile E. holds up, only to have RR run straight through it, and clearly through him as well. We don't get to see the expected coyote with a road-runner-shaped hole in the middle. His expression is more than sufficient.

The best gag might be the one which closes the cartoon, harking back to Tex Avery's penchant for characters holding up signs to replace dialog.

On a technical level, as with the Roadrunner series in general, the backgrounds are minimalistic and rather monochrome. This just lends emphasis to the animation, and by this stage Jones and his team of animators were doing fantastic things with physics, weight, acceleration, impact, inertia and so on (in their own parallel universe).

The Roadrunner cartoons have a somewhat undeserved reputation as late period, past their peak WB, but I don't think that's justified. In fct it isn't even really true, as the later RR cartoons weren't even Warner. There is a certain profundity to the Warner shorts though, which the earlier classic period shorts rarely approached, despite their many other virtues.

Good stuff. Teetering on 3.5 stars if only because I think the whole concept deserves more than 3.0. Great character animation and timing, marred a little by a few see-them-a-mile-off gags, but as a series the Roadrunner shorts are greater than the sum of their parts.