Stop! Look! And Hasten!

While there are some duds in the later years, the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons are mostly an enjoyable watch. There are also some great ones, and Stop! Look! And Hasten! is one of them, up there with the best of them.

Stop! Look! And Hasten! is very well-animated. It's vibrant in colour, smooth in how it's all drawn, simple but attractively detailed backgrounds and the character animation is some of the richest of the series, Coyote's facial expressions and reactions make the cartoon worth watching all on their own (especially in the gag on the train tracks). With Carl Stalling and the music, this viewer has always associated Stalling with writing consistently good to outstanding music scores for the Looney Tunes cartoons and they are nearly always one of the highlights. That is precisely the case with his music for Stop! Look! And Hasten!, the orchestration is lush and clever, it's lively and characterful rhythmically and it matches with everything seamlessly and even adds to the enjoyment.

The gags are some of the funniest and most brilliant of the series, even reasonably familiar ones like with the TNT and the starting gag feel fresh and Coyote's reaction in the train track gag elevates what could have been an ordinary gag to something memorable. Of the gags, the Burmese tiger, the bridge and ending gags are the ones that stand-out, they are hilarious and perfectly executed in terms of timing. Premise-wise, the story is formulaic and more of the same but with the material being so funny, the pacing so thrillingly breathless and everything feeling so fresh that doesn't matter, there have been instances where it does with the series but mostly in the later cartoons when the material wasn't anywhere near as strong.

Roadrunner is an amusing and quite visually cute character, but Coyote is generally far funnier and more interesting, one that is cunning and hilarious but easy to empathise with when his schemes go wrong. In conclusion, a fabulous Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon and one of the greatest of the series. 10/10 Bethany Cox

Stop! Look! and Hasten! (1954)

*** (out of 4)

Another good entry in the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner series has our favorite dumb but hard working friend still trying to catch his dinner. A motorcycle, a tiger, leg building vitamins and even a pop up steel wall are just some of the devices used by Wile. This is another fun, if routine, entry that manages to offer up some good twists as well as some nice laughs. The best sequence in my opinion is the one where Wile digs a trap to catch his dinner and thinks it has worked until he jumps into the hole. Another nice gag deals with him taking some vitamins to grow stronger legs, which makes him run faster but there is naturally a downfall.

The fifth pairing of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner is still good and features many gags that work, including a tiger trap, a pop-up steel wall, a motorcycle, a unfateful encounter with a train (Stop in the name of humanity), and a box of Acme-brand leg-building vitamins. I love the little gag of the coyote eating a fly in the beginning as well. All these cartoons make me so very happy for some unknown reason. This animated short can be seen on Disc 2 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2. It also features an optional commentary by Greg Ford.

My Grade: A

Some Road Runner cartoons don't start with the chase already in progress. In these cases: A) we get to see that cooky Coyote try out some hot cuisine (flies, tin cans, he'll try anything once) and B) when that tasty bird runs by, While E. acts as if he sees it for the very first time (starvation has been known to induce short term memory loss).

The gags in `Stop! Look! And Hasten!' may not be as elaborate as in later R.R. shorts, but the character animation is incredibly rich. Wile E. shows more emotion here than in all of his Sixties' outings combined. Other examples are the realistic body movement of a surprise guest animal and the effects ‘Acme Triple-Strength Fortified Leg Muscle Vitamins' (family size) have on the Coyote (kids, don't do drugs).

The backgrounds and settings are above average too, especially the chase through some Esher inspired train tunnels. We also learn that venturing into human invested parts of the desert can prove quite hazardous when you only communicate by holding up signs (Road Runners avoid problems like this by forming letters in the dust they leave behind).

7 out of 10

Chuck Jones's 'Stop, Look and Hasten' is one of the greatest installments in the whole Road Runner series. The fifth cartoon in the series, 'Stop, Look and Hasten' brings together all the lessons learned in the first four Road Runner shorts and uses them to create a perfect marriage between the ingredients that make these characters and their antics so popular. It combines the breathless pace of 'Going! Going! Gosh!', the wonderful reaction shots of 'Zipping Along' and the experimental extended chase scenes of 'Beep Beep' to hilarious effect. Even the oft-used gags are executed with such perfection that they breathe new life into the joke. Look to the falling bridge gag for proof. But 'Stop, Look and Hasten' isn't just a classic combination of elements from earlier cartoons. It brings to the Road Runner series a very valuable element; the extended set-up. Previous cartoons had just opened with the Coyote in pursuit of or awaiting the Road Runner. 'Stop, Look and Hasten' adds a slower paced opening in which we see the Coyote wandering slowly through the desert, attempting to eat anything from insects to tin cans. It's a great sequence which gives us a glimpse at the sad existence of the character outside of his pursuit of the Road Runner. These steady opening set-ups would go on to become an important part of later cartoons in the series. 'Stop, Look and Hasten' is simply a cut above most Road Runner cartoons. It has everything down perfectly. There's not a wasted second, a rarity in spot-gag cartoons such as this.