editors
JERRY BECK (LA)
AMID AMIDI (NY)
Beep! Beep!
July 18, 2007 4:23 am


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Looking for something to do today?
Try watching 43 Road Runner cartoons on YouTube.
Or if you prefer a more painless way of committing suicide, just hang yourself.

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Mark says:
07/18/07  4:44am

Well, that won’t stay on the tube for long I guess :) Lots of fun though, love the road runners but am more of a Speedy Gonzales man myself.

 
Hooper says:
07/18/07  6:37am

“Suicide” you say? Maybe. But what a way to go!

 
Anthony Strand says:
07/18/07  6:38am

Wow. I had no idea there were 43 Road Runner cartoons. I’m a big fan, but man, I don’t think I could watch more than 3 or 4 in one sitting.

 
uncle wayne says:
07/18/07  7:05am

nor I….but it was quite a treat, I might say, to wake up to the first one “Fast & Furry-ous!” Those first films are absolutely gorgeous!!! Spare me the latter ones, tho….yugghk!!

 
Chuck says:
07/18/07  7:14am

I would think that many of the modern cartoons on CN would kill me far sooner than the Road Runner. I do wonder how many different ways you can toss Wild E. off of a cliff though.

 
Thad Komorowski says:
07/18/07  7:17am

I can think of a few other series that would be so much more agonizing to the mind….

 
John says:
07/18/07  7:48am

Amid, are you supposed to hang yourself before, after or during the 11 Rudy Larriva Road Runners?

 
Martin Bell says:
07/18/07  8:16am

Wow, that’s tonight’s entertainment sorted. Cheers Amid.

That suicide crack was a bit dry! :)

 
Emmett Goodman says:
07/18/07  8:28am

Um, is this a cry for help?

 
Adam says:
07/18/07  8:49am

Don’t you mean “hmeep hmeep”?

 
Brad Constantine says:
07/18/07  9:46am

There goes the morning….All Hail Chuck Jones….As for the earlier post…According to my ACME Super Duper Calculator, There are approximately 4,672 ways to throw a coyote off a cliff…..Happy Wednesday everybody.

 
Elliot Cowan says:
07/18/07  10:19am

I never liked Road Runner as a kid but I am especially fond of them now.
This is wonderful – I hope they stay up for a little bit.

 
Michael DiMilo says:
07/18/07  10:57am

It’s the horrible Flash compression YouTube uses that makes classic animation look like it’s at the bottom of an aquarium. Yesterday I saw some YouTube animation on an iPhone (WiFi not EDGE) and it looked beautiful. The Road Runner deserves better.

 
Chris Sobieniak says:
07/18/07  2:57pm

Heh, why am I’m not surprised at this. :-)

Being reminded of being 6 and wanting to have nothing but a marathon of Road Runner cartoons on the tube, now we get that chance online I’ve already exhausted my whole life not to care less, oh well, the new generation can get a head start.

 
charles says:
07/18/07  7:49pm

So is it hip/cool/arty to hate Road Runner ‘toons now? And why, exactly? I never can tell with this snoblog.

 
Charles says:
07/18/07  10:55pm

That’s a lot of Road Runner.

I hated the Road Runner as a kid because I thought they were all the same but later I learned to enjoy it for Wile E’s crazy devices. So now I love the Road Runner. In small doses, anyway. And only the Chuck Jones ones.

 
tom says:
07/19/07  2:30am

Boy, that ain’t gonna happen.

A little Road Runner goes a long way, Coyote or not.

 
Tony Mines says:
07/19/07  5:11am

Suicide? Sounds positively life affirming. Though i’ll never find the time for them all before they’re pulled. which will be like tomorrow.

 
Bentos says:
07/19/07  6:45am

Don’t bore us, get to the chorus. Simple characters with simple motives and basically the same gag over and over again.

Brilliant.

 
Jpox says:
07/19/07  8:42am

Ahhhh……Roadrunner.
Eases the pain….

 
Kitschensyngk says:
07/19/07  8:42am

Oh well. If you’ve gotta go, I guess that’s the way to do it.

 
Chuck R. says:
07/19/07  9:20am

I’ll admit, as I get older, I can watch fewer and fewer Hollywood cartoons of any kind in one sitting. But that’s not criticism —these cartoons were designed to be mints, not full-course dinners.

That said, there’s something wonderful about the repetition and the formula. Like Groundhog Day, they’re the same, and yet, not.

Cartoon fans like me who grew up with these can’t possibly appreciate them the way audiences back then did. It was a sendup of the cat-and-mouse chase formula, and a coyote and a roadrunner were an unlikely pair of animals to get into a cartoon, let alone a series. Now, we’re all jaded and we mistake the parody as the cliche itself. A similar thing has happened to “What’s up Doc.”

Ten years from now, I’ll be explaining to my daughters that many moons ago “Don’t have a cow, man.” was a scream —entirely unexpected.

 
Lee says:
07/19/07  12:22pm

charles (with lower case “c”):
You hit the nail on the head.

 
captain murphy says:
07/19/07  12:35pm

I think Road Runner could make a nice mashup. Just collect all the falls, or all the beeps.

But viewing for more than fifteen minutes is snoozeville. No really, I have not yet been able to completely make it through the DVDs in the Golden Collection that are pure RoadRunner in one sitting.

Which is why it was the Bugs Bunny/RoadRunner hour, not the RoadRunner hour.

 
tom says:
07/19/07  3:23pm

to charles with the lc “C”:

I don’t think that anyone thinks it’s “hip” or anything, but I personally have always been disappointed by the inclusion of the RR cartoons in the WB canon of greats. I like Wile E., I like ACME, but the cartoons as a whole are just really, really repetitive. I guess that’s it’s own kind of art, but it’s not entertaining at all to me. Especially after having seen them all at least once as a kid.

 
Michael Jones says:
07/19/07  4:47pm

The early Road Runners were ok, especially the Latin appelations. But I truly preferred the Coyote/Sheepdog showdowns.

 
Chuck R. says:
07/19/07  7:11pm

I’m going to watch them chronologically just to see the evolution of Maurice Noble’s exquisite desert landscape. I’m up to number three and it’s not quite there yet.

(Amid’s frame grab captured a good one!)

 
David says:
07/20/07  4:59am

“Suicide” I would call watching all 3 Sherk movies suicide. Any thing from the golden age of animation is better than sitting through the soulless garbage we call animation that is made today.

Did any one watch the Emmy screeners?

 
Paul says:
07/20/07  12:31pm

If it weren’t for the “repetitiveness” of the RR cartoons, we’d never have classics like What’s Opera Doc or Rabbit Of Seville. Read “Chuck Amuk” if you’re not sure why…

 
PCUnfunny says:
07/24/07  11:53am

One Road Runner cartoon in one year is more then enough for me.

 
steve w. says:
07/24/07  11:32pm

It’s unfair to complain that watching several Road Runners in a row can get tiresome. They were never meant to be viewed that way! Personally, I love the Chuck Jones RR cartoons, especially the ones from from ‘Zoom and Bored’ thru the last in Chuck’s WB theatrical canon, ‘War and Pieces’. The group of eleven cheaper Road Runners directed by Rudy Larriva should be burned. BTW, many of these youtube transfers aren’t worth watching, due to sync problems.

 
captain murphy says:
07/25/07  7:46pm

It may be an unfair complaint, but you know, we love to watch, and we love to tweeze out the subtle differences and details, in the most contrived stuff, but…. Not that RR is contrived. But the difficulty is still there. It is not like we hate the stuff, or even dislove it.

All I am saying is, it is damn hard, to watch several in a row, it is even a challenge. Raise your hand if you have watched the entire RR DVD in the golden collection, without drifting off, mentally or physically. It is great stuff, that was never meant to be watched en masse.

Even though I would still like to see even more minimalist mashups and collections, of the falls, or the beeps, just to be able to SEE the differences in a shorter sitting.

 
Stella says:
07/26/07  1:17am

If you want to see Chuck Jones making the same formula interesting and different every time, look at the Pepe Le Pew cartoons rather than the Road Runners. The fact they had different settings rather than the same old desert opened up a wealth of possibilities. And Pepe’s endearments to the resisting Pussy alone are worth the price of admission: “You are ze cabbage, I am ze corned beef” – or was it “I am ze corned beef, you are ze cabbage”?

 
Talulah's spongecake says:
08/13/07  12:51pm

I just Love Wile E. ( Road Runner too!) But I don’t like to watch his cartoons on a site such as You tube! The quality is not always high, and I think I can watch better 43 cartoons on dvd by staying on my favourite couch, with some snacks and, why not, some friends!
Hey…Why they don’t show the cartoons where Wile E. try to catch Bugs Bunny, like Operation Rabbit?

 
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