Roadrunner a Go-Go

'Roadrunner a Go Go' is like 'Fastest with the Mostest', also viewed for the first time recently. It is not one of the classics, in a series of cartoons that are mostly really enjoyable with the best ones being brilliant, but it is nowhere among one of the duds like the mid to late 60s cartoons.

The use of stock footage coupled with its mockumentary style could have come across as pointless if executed wrong, and could have been cheaply done, but actually it is very well done and clever. The mockumentary scenes presented by Coyote display brilliantly Coyote's intelligence and cunning wit in finding solutions to his many errors (which are just as well done as the errors), and even though he is not doing any physical comedy in these scenes he is still very funny and who cannot help root for him.

'Roadrunner a Go Go's' sight gags are not the most hilarious of the series, with the cliff gag while still very funny being smelt a mile off, or the most visually imaginative. They are still very well-animated and are never less than highly amusing. The dialogue is sharp and witty, displaying Coyote's interesting personality very well indeed. Mel Blanc, yes this is one of the few instances where Coyote talks (the others being his highly entertaining cartoons with none other than Bugs Bunny), does typically wonderfully with the characterisation and it is some of his most subtle voice work.

Here the animation is bright and colourful as well as fluidly drawn while adopting a sketchier drawing style than what was seen before. The backgrounds avoid being sparse and are far from lifeless, while Chuck Jones' animation style is all over it and instantly recognisable. Milt Franklyn's music is rhythmically lively and is beautifully orchestrated, also doing well to fit with the action without quite enhancing it as effortlessly as Carl Stalling. But at least it fits, never jars stylistically and never sounds cheap, unlike Bill Lava's scoring for the Rudy Larriva-directed cartoons. The song is remarkably catchy and not milked to death or irritating, the choral voices are nicely blended too.

Only Roadrunner is not as impressive as the rest of the cartoon, still amusing but essentially he is a plot device, doesn't have an awful lot to do and his material is not as interesting as Coyote, who feels much more of a main character.

All in all, while not quite a classic, all the ingredients are there, and a cartoon that could have easily been unnecessary and pointless is executed really cleverly. A surprisingly impressive 9/10. Bethany Cox

1962's Adventures Of The Road Runner featurette was a zenith in the most popular series directed by Chuck Jones, and it yielded two semi-compilation shorts released independently in 1965. Of the two, Roadrunner A Go Go is the better, for it focuses on the actual pursuit of the famed speedster by his Coyote counterpart as, for the first time in the Road Runner series, Wile E. speaks - he'd spoken in Bugs Bunny cartoons other than 1963's Road Runner fill-in Hare Breadth Hurry, but never in the Road Runner cartoons.

This short uses the musical intro from Adventures (featuring some very effective animation of flowers blooming the the morning sunlight) complete with roto-scoped remake of the three-way road split gag from 1958's Hip! Hip! Hurry! before cutting to the cliffside rope trick and its unfortunate outcome. We then cut to Wile E. notating observations on flaws in his previous schemes, as he explains to the audience the painstaking research he undertakes to correct errors in a hazardous life such as his - here Maurice Noble and company add enormously to the short's atmosphere in the use of elaborate backgrounds of the vast libraries of film, still slides, etc. used by Wile E. (today of course he'd also have digital film, DVDs, and so forth littered about with his spools of film and reams of slides, which would make for some even more interesting backgrounds).

This short features stock scenes from 1961's Zip 'n Snort before cutting to its signature gag, the catapult that was reused in 1963's To Beep Or Not To Beep with new Bill Lava music; comparing both scenes with their differing scores today shows how much better Milt Franklyn and the mammoth Warner studio orchestra truly were in scoring compared to the more bare-boned efforts of Lava; it also displays the vast superiority of the classic Franklyn-scored 1950s opening title compared to the cheesier Lava-scored "Merry Go Round Broke Down" theme substituted.

While this was by no means the last Road Runner short, nor the last to be directed by Chuck Jones, it represents for both an apex of quality.

One of three shorts that were made out of a 1962 failed pilot for a Road Runner TV series. The best of these was To Beep or Not to Beep. This one's enjoyable, too, although it seems like a 'clip show' when viewed separate from the rest of the pilot. In this one Wile E. Coyote reviews past efforts to catch the Road Runner (via stock footage from older shorts). This is probably the only Road Runner short to feature a song ("Out in the Desert") and I gotta say I like it. The only problem I have with this cartoon, aside from it using old footage, is that the colors seem washed out in spots. But that could be the quality of the print I saw. Seek out the original pilot if you can. Independently the three shorts made from it are good but combined they're terrific.

These Roadrunner cartoons were my favorites when I was a kid mostly because they were the most absurd and imaginative of all WB cartoon. The basic idea is that Coyote desperately tries to catch the Roadrunner and invents a huge amount of new interesting ways to do it... and even more ways to fail. In this episode Coyote tries to learn of his mistakes and makes a retry. Some of the ideas are quite predictable but some are surprising.

This is one of the few episodes where Coyote actually talks - in most episodes there's no dialog at all or it's written in signs. It's interesting that WB named these cartoons after the Roadrunner even though the Coyote actually has the leading role and the Roadrunner just... well just runs and makes that beeb-beeb thing.