Scrambled Aches

Fun Road Runner & Coyote short from Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese. This one has Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Road Runner with dynamite on a string, a homemade windsurfing contraption, a rocket, an anvil, a steam roller, and the classic ACME Dehydrated Boulder. As usual with this series when Jones was at the helm, the gags are funny and well-executed. The animation is great, with well-drawn characters and backgrounds. Love the colors. The music is also very nice and suits the action perfectly. Some will criticize this series as being formulaic and repetitive, and it certainly does "return to the well" sometimes, but I find that Jones and Maltese do try and do different things with the gags even if they are similar to previous ones. This moves along at a quick pace and probably doesn't linger on a couple of the gags as long as it should. It's fun, though, and definitely worth a look.

After the disappointing 'There They Go-Go-Go', Chuck Jones's 'Scrambled Aches' is an improvement. The cartoon which saw the Road Runner series entering double figures with its tenth outing, 'Scrambled Aches' is another fairly standard Road Runner cartoon but with better gags than its predecessor. What also makes 'Scrambled Aches' notable is that there are a couple of cases in which it looks like the Coyote might finally be successful in his attempts to capture the Road Runner. An early attempt involving a falling anvil seems to be going according to plan but for the Road Runner's keen senses, but it is the climactic, extended gag involving a steam roller in which the Coyote seems to have outwitted the Road Runner with an elaborate bluff. It's a funny but frustrating final sequence which employs an elaborate twisted logic to bilk the Coyote out of his rightful meal. Aside from these gags, 'Scrambled Aches' is not especially worthy of praise but it's certainly worth seeing and guarantees a couple of belly laughs at the very least.

This is a perfect example of Road runner at the height of his career. Every joke has an unexpected twist or two and there is a natural progression in Wile E. Coyote's traps. At first the Coyote tries to stop the Runner in his tracks by tripping him up or felling him with a dynamite bolo. When that fails he does his best to match the speed of his prey, by combining roller skates with a sail and propeller, riding a giant firecracker or using a wall mounted spring.

A brief word about the backgrounds. They are simple but very stylized. The artists deliberately neglected to colour between the lines of the purple rocks and just about every pebble and cactus is left unpainted, making them appear translucent. W. E. and double R. on the other hand are perfectly animated. Even in a couple of filler scenes where we see Coyote getting inspiration for another trap, his expressions are priceless.

Obviously getting more and more frustrated, the Coyote becomes intent on destroying his nemesis regardless how much will be left over to eat. Therefore he tries boulder flipping, anvil dropping and best of all makes use of Acme dehydrated boulders (just add water). Finally, his genius level intellect entices him to combine sly deception with brute force. An elaborate double trap uses both the junior size outboard steamroller and a cannon disguised as an escape tunnel. But just like Tom Cruise can use an exploding helicopter to his advantage in Mission Impossible, so can Road runner use a cannon ball as a means of escape.

8 out of 10

They aren't kidding when they call this cartoon "Scrambled Aches"! The most original gag here, at least in my opinion, is the dehydrated boulder (and you know what happens during combinations of Wile E. Coyote and boulders!). As a previous reviewer noted, a notable aspect of this cartoon is that the backgrounds have an almost mystical feel to themselves. Of course, there's no reason to get all hung up on that when you can luxuriate in WEC getting his just desserts for trying to harm Road Runner. If ever I'm driving through the southwest United States, I'll just keep my eye out in case there is a coyote chasing a road runner; maybe I'll witness the sorts of things that these cartoons portray.

All in all, another classic cartoon.

Scrambled Aches (1957)

*** (out of 4)

Tenth film in the series has Wile E. Coyote up to the same old stuff but this time out we get a few new tricks with the best one being the dehydrated boulder. This is a pretty routine entry in the series but you can't expect too much out of the tenth film especially considering this was pretty much a one-joke series with the same type of jokes being used over and over again. The action is certainly top-notch as our beloved coyote finds one way after another to hurt himself. The small steam roller and escape hatch are very well done. Another thing to mention is the colors used here, which are extremely warm from start to finish. I'm going to guess this was done on purpose and isn't just the work of the remastered DVD since this short is on the same disc as the others.