MEEP

I have me a theory based purely on my own musings while cooking myself lunch and watching old Looney Tunes on Cartoon Network.  Probably I am noticing things that are glaringly obvious and stupid to someone who knows from animation and film, just as I am contemptuous of people who declare that "the ABC song and Twinkle Twinkle have the same rhythm!"*  Or I am noticing things that have already been written about and I just haven't searched long enough.  But I'm having too much fun with this train of thought to keep it to myself, even if it is potentially idiotic and/or unintentionally pirated.

In my neverending search for film and television trivia/nostalgia, one of my favorite tidbits (owing likely to the fact that it has to do with two movies I adore) is the fact that Dumbo was made quickly and cheaply to help recoup the losses from Fantasia, which was a pretty big flop in its initial release.  They expected Fantasia to capture people's hearts and they expected Dumbo to just squeak by and nearly the opposite happened.  Fortunately, both movies turned out to be major favorites over the course of the seven billion re-releases that each one has gotten as film technology has changed.  (I've not looked, but it occurs to me to wonder whether they pull that Disney Vault crapola with digital retailers like iTunes and Amazon.  They're like the Girl Scouts of cinema and their best films are the cookies.)

I thought of this today while I was watching Wile E. Coyote attempt to accost the Road Runner.  My extensive minutes-long research on Wikipedia has not produced anything that confirms my theory, but it didn't produce anything that disproves it either.  To be safe, however, please consider everything in this post, as you likely consider everything on this blog, to be purely hypothetical.

I bet that the Coyote/RR cartoons acted as budget savers for the Warner Bros. animation studio.  During the golden age of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, such cartoons were shown in theaters and I would think that they, though to a smaller degree, were at the mercy of audience whims just like feature films.  Maybe if they blew the budget on one of the bigger names like Bugs or Daffy, but still needed to create another cartoon for another venue or purpose, the Coyote cartoons were a quick fix.

Consider:

1. Sound and Syncing

As far as I know, in every cartoon that pits Wile E. against the Road Runner, not one word of spoken dialogue was uttered.  (There were about 6 or so cartoons produced toward the end of the Looney Tunes era that paired Wile E. with Bugs Bunny - in these, he finally speaks and turns out to be kind of a jerk.)  So they didn't have to hire voice actors or worry about animating mouths to sync with the recorded dialogue, which probably saved a great deal of time and money.  They had only the musical score, the sound effects (your standard booms, bangs, propellers, large springs, hammers, etc.) and the one piece of vocalization - "thunka-thunka-MEEP-MEEP" - to sync with the animated images.  They may have granted the Coyote one or two "YEEEEEEOWS!" in reaction to being blown up, but I have a feeling that "YEEEEEEOW!" is easier to animate and sync than, "My goodness, but that was a painful experience."

I noticed something with the ubiquitous MEEP today in my viewing: in this particular cartoon, even though the MEEP MEEP happened several times, Road Runner was only on screen for one of them.  For all the others, he was either in the process of running toward us from a distance with fine details obscured, or was simply not visible at all, his location meant to be inferred by the viewer based on wherever we last saw him.  Genius, I tell you!  Because then you don't have to be achingly precise with where the sound goes - as long as it occurs somewhere within whatever 5-second time period you're trying to establish his presence, you're good!

2. Storyboard/Plot

It's rather difficult to call what was going on in these cartoons a "plot."  One reason I have never actually been fond of these types of cartoons is the repetition.  I feel similarly about Tom and Jerry.  But again, this could have been a money-saving move, because you don't have to pay a bunch of writers to come up with the witty banter and clever mischief required of more complex stars like Bugs Bunny.  You don't even have to use "real" writers - you can take two of your goofy friends out for dinner and then ask them to come up with weird schemes to catch Road Runners.  Insert explosion/failure and poof: completed script!

3. Setting

This ties a little into the previous point about the monotony of the stories.  Whereas Porky Pig might be on an island in one cartoon and in a house in the next, or Daffy in the woods one day and in the arctic that night, or Bugs continually making wrong turns at Albuquerque that land him in all manner of locales, the Coyote and the Road Runner reside exclusively in Unnamed Desert.  Backgrounds often have little detail besides the topography of whichever section of Unnamed Desert they're hanging out in.  Road + sand + cliffs + sky = a Coyote/Road Runner background!

*     *     *     *     *     *

Of course, it is possible (likely, in fact) that I am grossly generalizing and conjecturing because of a hyper brain that no longer has students to visit its whims upon.  This was, after all, ignited by a single viewing of a single cartoon out of many in the same vein, which is not a statistically significant sample.  But it was a fun little mental exercise to envision what sort of work might have gone into these sorts of cartoons as opposed to others.  Chuck Jones was involved in several of the Coyote/Road Runner cartoons and was also one of the major animators and shapers of Bugs Bunny and it mystifies me a little how such a creative talent could produce such different products.  Bugs cartoons are filled with personality, layered with cultural commentary and innuendo, infused with all manner of comedy from the satirical to the slapstick...they dazzle with their compact complexity** and Coyote cartoons just seem so...elementary.  So formulaic and dull.  I have trouble believing that the same sort of professional pride and vigor went into "I'm a fiddler crab!  Shoot me!  It's fiddler crab season!" as went into "......[crash boom MEEP]...."  I keep seeing where different behind-the-scenes books have been published, but I've yet to find many of them in Kindle editions.  What a bunch of crap.  Until that happens, expect lots more navel-gazing and hypothesizing from me!

Actually, you can probably expect that henceforth in any case.   

*For any nonmusical readers who are mystified by the ABC/Twinkle thing...they have the same rhythm, which is a single element of music, because they are in fact the same tune, which is a broader entity encompassing rhythm.  It would be like your friend saying, "This vegetable is the same color as this vegetable!" while pointing to two identical pieces of broccoli.
**Well, most of them dazzle...the Censored Eleven disappoint in their blatant racism and stereotyping.