Shot and Bothered

The top 7 signs that you are watching a really terrible Road Runner cartoon:

The #7 sign: It is directed by Rudy Lerriva. He directed most of the final Road Runner/Coyote shorts in the last years of the Warner Brother's Golden Age. His budgets were obviously smaller than those that came before him, but that is no excuse for the poor work that resulted on screen for EVERY SINGLE short he made. Rudy Lerriva is to the Road Runner what Gene Deitch is to Tom & Jerry.

The #6 sign: The credits are shown with a repetitive and grating tune by Bill Lava. You hear this tune and other, equally annoying tunes throughout every Rudy Lerriva Road Runner cartoon. They are incredibly maddening, and you will have them stuck in your head for days on end, especially the opening one.

The #5 sign: The backgrounds do not match the animate objects at all. For many cartoons, this is normal and acceptable, but Lerriva cartoons take this to ridiculous extremes. For instance, Road Runner cartoons are famous for featuring large rocks balanced on top of small stalagmites in the desert. In `Boulder Wham!' Wile E. Coyote throws a rope around a rope on a stalagmite, but the soon-to-be animate rock looks so incredibly different from the non-movable stalagmite that you know what will happen long before it occurs. The best Road Runners are when the animators surprise you with what befalls the Coyote next, not when they telegraph a lame gag so that you can spot the outcome a mile away.

The #4 sign: You start to notice reused frames. Lerriva used the same scenes of Wile E. Coyote from cartoon to cartoon. Stuff like Wile E. reading a book and looking up from it with an evil grin, Wile E. getting an idea symbolized by a light bulb in a storm cloud above his head, or Wile E. getting tired of running and stopping to pant. These scenes usually are thrown in and have no real need of being in the cartoon other than to pad out time.

The #3 sign: You spot really bad animation glitches. In `Shot and Bothered,' Wile E. Coyote falls off a cliff and lands on the ground. Then a big rock lands on him. Or does it? You can still see the Coyote's head behind the rock, as if it landed right next to him. Lerriva could have just removed Wile E. from the frame after the rock landed, but he didn't and the result is totally embarrassing.

The #2 sign: Zero payoff. The result of a gag, in these cases the Coyote's plans backfiring, is what I call a `payoff.' All the Warner Brothers animators handled it differently, some better than others. Robert McKimson, for example, was not very good at executing payoff in the 60's, but even 60's McKimson does better than Lerriva. Worse is when Lerriva draws out the gag, since a drawn out gag requires a better payoff than a short gag. Chuck Jones occasionally would make long scenes in his Roadrunner shorts, but he always knew how to deliver funny, unpredictable payoff (e.g. the time the Coyote got inside a large, hollow metal ball and rolled down a hill). Does Lerriva really need to spend so much time showing the Coyote building a dynamite-rigged phone booth when we all know the obvious and unfunny result? Even the most promising of gags, like the funny car in `Out and Out Rout,' are set up to be funny and then flop like a dying fish on a slab of concrete.

And the #1 sign that you know you are watching a bad Road Runner cartoon: The Coyote acts like he has an ear of corn shoved up his derriere. I am sorry, there is no better way to describe the ridiculous way the Coyote runs in Lerriva's shorts. If you've seen it, you know what I mean and hopefully agree that it looks really, really terrible.

Zantara's score, for ALL of Lerriva's shorts: 1

Shot and Bothered is another of the terrible Rudy Larriva Road Runner cartoons made in the 1960s when Warner Bros. contracted Format Films to make the shorts. The animation is inferior and much of it is cheaply reused from scene to scene. At least the colors are bright. The music will have you clawing at your ears until they are bloody stumps. The gags are rarely funny or smart. If Chuck Jones was a surgeon, Rudy Larriva was a lumberjack. There's one particularly galling gag where the Coyote drops a huge boulder into a canyon to act as a roadblock for the Road Runner. If Jones had done this bit, he would have come up with some funny way to have the Road Runner get around or through this obstacle. Plus you can damn sure bet it would have been well-animated. Larriva doesn't know how to craft a funny gag and could care less about quality animation, so he just has the Road Runner disappear as he comes into contact with the boulder. Then cracks appear in the boulder and it falls apart. The worst part of this entire failed gag is the Coyote's reaction. It's like Larriva didn't know where to go with the joke so he just skips ahead to the next one. The ending of this short has to be among the worst and laziest I've ever seen.

To disappoint me with a Road Runner cartoon you have to try really hard, but 'Shot and Bothered' succeeds. In this one the Coyote tries to catch the Road Runner with some dynamite, suction cups from Acme, a skateboard, a tennis net and some helium gas with a bomb he wants to drop. Of course the Coyote fails every time and hurts himself a lot.

This must be one of the most boring Road Runner vs. Wile E. Coyote cartoons out there. The only gag that made me smile was the one with the tennis net although it was even more predictable than most others. The music didn't do much good for the cartoon and the animation was definitely not good. I don't know if it the director Rudy Larriva or something else, but you might as well skip this one.

This is said with a very heavy heart, because it is not as if the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons are bad as a whole. In fact, they are far from bad, they are actually very enjoyable and the best of them brilliant even and among the funniest Looney Tunes cartoons made regardless of how formulaic they are story-wise. The mid-late-60s cartoons however were real let downs, and Shot and Bothered is for me down there with their worst.

As always, even with films, shows and cartoons that are not good it's worth trying to find things good about them, and while there are few redeeming qualities with Shot and Bothered. Almost all of the gags don't work, but one does crack a small smile and that's the tennis net gag, it is not very surprising but it is the most well-timed gag and is the only gag that didn't leave me stone-faced. Wile's facial expressions also amuse and endear in places, he is still easy to feel sympathy towards and they don't look too ugly visually either.

Wile unfortunately has been much funnier and much more interesting before, a shame because he is one of Looney Tunes' most entertaining and interesting characters. Here the material is not strong or clever enough for his personality or comic timing to shine properly, his cunning side is underplayed and he is flatly and scrappily drawn. Roadrunner looks awful, again looking like he was drawn very hastily and with little care, and not only does he have little personality but he just isn't funny, more irritating than anything else. Their chemistry is similarly very bland, as a result of the lacking material and that there isn't enough of them together.

One of the worst things about Shot and Bothered is the animation, the mid-late-60s Looney Tunes cartoons (especially the Daffy-Speedy cartoons the later Roadrunner cartoons) did look cheap, due to lower budgets, less people being involved and the deadlines being tighter, and Shot and Bothered with its sparse backgrounds, flat colours, stiff and scrappy character animation, use of recycled frames and incomplete visuals is the worst-looking of the lot. Bill Lava's stock music score is repetitive, completely lacks the energy of the music of Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn and it sounds completely at odds with the action of the cartoon, too discordant and like Lava had no idea what the humour was meant to be like.

Shot and Bothered's major failure is that it fails to entertain. The gags are tired (primarily because it has been done before and much better), poorly animated and very badly paced, some are drawn out (the beginning went on for too long) but mostly they feel incomplete and like they skip to the next one with no break, giving it a very different feel to when the series was in its prime, which severely hurts the humour, which is barely there as a result. One can forgive the story for being formulaic, so long as the timing was sharp and the material was funny and clever enough, seeing as Shot and Bothered is all over the map in timing and that the gags are not funny and are too over-familiar in this case it isn't forgivable. It both feels rushed, due to the skippy feel of the gags and the cheap feel of the cartoon as a whole, and dull, because the material is so lacking.

In conclusion, as an overall whole the Roadrunner and Wile E Coyote series is enjoyable but Shot and Bothered is one of the worst in the series and one of my least favourite Looney Tunes cartoons in fact. 3/10 Bethany Cox