Review by Spleen

Around this time the desert backgrounds in the Road Runner cartoons - always splashes of sun-baked colour, always attractive, always inventive - started to look alike. (Not WORSE - if anything, better - but alike.) The gags, though, started to look LESS alike. This cartoon has gravity and dynamite, same as always, but there's also unwieldy technological sophistication (the unicycle; or the rifle-in-a-camera, which backfires - literally - in a particularly clever way), jokes where the only point is that they defeat our expectations, and also the kind of absurdist joke, misplaced in the Road Runner universe, but which Jones from time to time was unable to resist (in this case, the Coyote goes to a lot of effort to create the ILLUSION of a railroad crossing, and ... well, you know what happens). Perhaps it was a mistake to include one of every kind of joke in a single cartoon.

Or perhaps not. One doesn't so much watch individual Road Runner cartoons as immerse oneself in the mythology.