Run, Run, Sweet Road Runner

As far as the Rudy Larriva-directed Roadrunner and Wile E Coyote cartoons go, 'Run, Run, Sweet Road Runner' is one of the more watchable ones, actually looking like a little effort went into it.

Unfortunately there are far better entries in the series, which is, as has been said by this reviewer many times before, very enjoyable on the whole, the best of them brilliant even. While nowhere near the worst of the Rudy Larriva-directed "efforts" (along with 'Out and Out Rout' it is one of the better ones), 'Run, Run, Sweet Roadrunner' saw the beginning of the decline of the series. 'The Wild Chase' is pretty poor too but even that is better than the worst of the Larriva-directed cartoons.

While there are funnier and more visually imaginative gags in the series overall, these gags for a Larriva cartoon are actually decent, being not tediously paced and not being tired or too predictable. For Larriva two of them were more elaborate than a vast majority of the gags in the later cartoons in the Roadrunner/Coyote series. The lightning rod gag was pretty funny to me. The pacing manages not to be too tedious, some of the rapport between the two characters entertains if not used enough and Coyote still amuses and affects (due to his clever and devious traps but all of them backfiring) with well-drawn cunning facial expressions.

'Run, Run, Sweet Road Runner' is especially let down by the animation and the music. Even for a period with tighter deadlines and lower budgets the animation throughout looks cheap. It's flatly coloured with static backgrounds, very sparse detail, choppy editing and very scrappy character animation. Bill Lava's music seldom works in the Roadrunner/Coyote cartoons he scored for, and fared just as badly in the Daffy Duck/Speedy Gonzales cartoons, and nothing here has changed my mind. It's just grating, it's repetitive, it's so cheaply and discordantly orchestrated and worst of all (unlike the fitting and action-enhancing music of Milt Franklyn and especially Carl Stalling) it is completely at odds with the action, almost like Lava had forgotten what sort of cartoon he was composing for.

While the Roadrunner/Coyote cartoons are formulaic, the story despite better pacing and more tolerable material doesn't completely engage with painfully obvious outcomes. Roadrunner is essentially a plot device and not an interesting one, with very little to do, and while he would get more obnoxious later on he is a long way from funny or endearing here, quite the opposite.

All in all, for a Rudy Larriva-directed Roadrunner/Coyote cartoon 'Run, Run, Sweet Road Runner' is watchable but there are cartoons in the series that are a million times better, with far better production values, funnier and cleverer material, more imaginative use of the formula and a more likable dynamic between the two characters. 6/10 Bethany Cox

In the last two or three years, the majority of the Warner Brothers cartoons were simply there. There was nothing spectacularly good or bad about most of them. The music was almost uniformly horrid, backgrounds were average at best, animation was limited, but some had decent gags. The Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons fared the best, probably because they had no dialog and thus didn't have an additional mediocre element to remind the viewer just how good the earlier work was. The concept also seemed to adapt itself more readily to the economic realities of limited animation, with the static nature of things sometimes actually helping the gags. Not a triumph, but watchable. Not too bad. For completeists.

"Run, Run, Sweet Road Runner" marked Rudy Larriva's directorial debut at Warner's (he directed a few Mr. Magoo shorts at UPA in the 1950's). Larriva also did the story, which is dominated by two slow, elaborate set-pieces. First, the Coyote erects a series of signs which lead to a bowl of bird seed shaded by covered spikes. But he leaves his binoculars where they focus the sun's rays on the rope which suspends the potentially lethal device. Then he disguises a lightning rod as a female Road Runner, and does a rain dance to attract a thunderstorm. Lightning strikes the disguised rod, which is caressed by the bird, but nothing happens. The Coyote summons another bolt, and gets it. This film isn't repellently tedious, but fails to provide the fast, funny entertainment of earlier Road Runner cartoons.

-Tony