Boulder Wham!

Typically weak Road Runner & Wile E. Coyote short from Rudy Larriva. Lame gags that are unimaginative retreads of material from earlier cartoons. The animation is flat and unimpressive. Why are the mountains and desert backgrounds colored pink? So much pink in this. The worst part of any Rudy Larriva Road Runner short is the awful Bill Lava score. It sounds like stock music that is the same in every short with no effort to match the action and pace of the cartoon. Also the sound effects are louder and more obtrusive than usual. This cartoon is a par for the course effort from Larriva, which is another way of saying don't watch this trash. Seek out any of the great Chuck Jones shorts instead.

The 60's Road Runner cartoons by DePatie-Freleng Enterprises make my skin crawl. Thinking of the old Chuck Jones cartoons, I feel nauseous watching these compilations of humorless, unentertaining "gags". In "Boulder Wham!" (another one of those lame titles, nothing like the witty puns and jokes by Maltese), the Coyote is trying to capture the Road Runner, a calm spectator on the other side of a gorge.

The animation is worse than today's television-budget, mass-produced cartoons on Kids' WB, Cartoon Network and Nickelodean. Every time I sit through this cartoon and others like it, it's a painful ordeal to get to the classics that hopefully follow. The gags are absolutely dry and the characters hardly have detectable expressions. Coyote resorts to stuff that he would never have used in a Jones cartoon. Disney might have gone down the drain, but Warner Bros.? Once upon a time, I didn't even know these cartoons existed, only having seen the Golden Age cartoons. I was happy then.

Of Rudy Larriva's Roadrunners, "Boulder Wham!" has the best story. The gags are well set up with uncommonly good suspense-building, and the hypnotism sequence works especially well.

Unfortunately, the Coyote's many canyon falls are repetitive and poorly animated due to the film's low budget (each Larriva Roadrunner cost only $18,000). Fortunately, the animators devised some funny expressions and poses. The result is a cartoon which is no match for Chuck Jones's Roadrunners but may pleasantly surprise those who've endured other 1965-9 Warner's cartoons.

The coyote fell off of the cliff about six times. If he was able to survive these falls and to climb back up to the top, then why didn't he just climb up to the other side of the gorge where the roadrunner has been standing? It was pretty comical, and perhaps it was the point.

Overall, cartoon was okay, nothing to write home about though.

Of many series cartoons that involved a chase between two characters, the Coyote and Road Runner ones were often the most repetitive that ran for years and years. But when Chuck Jones was at the helm, you at least got some creativity concerning gags that often built to a hilarious crescendo by the end. Here, as directed by Rudy Larriva, it's just a sense of deja vu that often got more boring with each effort. Though it scores some points with a somewhat new premise of having the Coyote trying to find ways to go to the other side of the cliff while the Road Runner just stays at that other side, the results are just meh. So on that note, I'd only recommend Boulder Wham! If you're a completist concerning this particular series.