To Beep or Not to Beep

This is a Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner cartoon. As far as I'm concerned, there has never been a bad one of those. Wile reads a cookbook with a Road Runner recipe. He sets off to catch a Road Runner.

This has been re-edited from a failed TV pilot. The best sequence has to be the catapult. I love that he keeps going back to it. The comedy gets raised with each new iteration of failure. If there is anything missing, it does need some ACME product placement. There is a joke at the end which is connected to that. It would work better if Wile peels off an ACME sticker to reveal the contraption's true origins.

TO BEEP OR NOT TO BEEP (1963) is my favorite Roadrunner cartoon ever made. The best gag is when the coyote tries to catch the roadrunner in a noose. The catapult gag, originally from ZOOM AND BORED, is even better here. This only made it to one tape, The Classic Chase. Too bad, because this is a gem. The end of this one was surprising. There's more great gags in between, such as the wrecking ball. There's never a bad moment in this cartoon. The best Looney Tunes were made in the sixties, but this tops them off. Watch this and laugh out loud.

Grade: A+

A classic Road Runner & Wile E. Coyote short directed by Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble. Most of the material from this short was originally made as part of a Road Runner TV pilot. It's a very funny cartoon with some memorable layered gags that play off one another more than the usual Road Runner & Coyote cartoon that goes from one gag to another with little or no connection. The highlight of these gags is the final one involving Wile E. using different types of catapults with each one failing in hilariously different ways. The animation is excellent with nice, bright colors and great action. The energetic score from Bill Lava is quite possibly his best work on this series, for which he is known for producing some truly awful music. It's a fantastic short that, like another reviewer says, is probably the best Road Runner & Coyote short from the '60s.

First of all, I agree with others here: this is an outstanding Road Runner cartoon, maybe the best I've ever seen. It combines great color, great "camera" angles, clever stunts and a very funny Wile (at least his "yeeeeeowwwws!)

It begins peacefully with Wile reading a book. No wonder our favorite coyote is always after the Road-Runner. According to the "Western Cookery" book, "possibly the most delicious of all western game bird is the road-runner." The rest of it is the normal chase.

What's above normal are the two long gags. I've often said the best ones are those that are drawn out a bit longer. There is a super one in here involving a big metal spring and a boulder. It's one of the best and inventive sight gags I've ever witness on a RR cartoon. The other one, with the catapult is a bunch of little jokes all rolled into one with a surprise ending (regarding the company which built the device.)

Very good and thoroughly enjoyable Roadrunner-Wile E.Coyote cartoon, one of their better ones of the 60s in my view. It is not all that surprising as to how it ends(the story is also a fairly formulaic one in the first place), then again the Roadrunner-Coyote series are not about the stories strictly speaking but about the quality of the gags. You do miss Coyote's looks to the camera, which were kind of breaking-the-fourth-wall-without-a-word, and despite the clever overhead shot and with the cactus the falling down the cliff gag has been done to death. The animation has been more detailed before, budget constraints perhaps, but the colours are still really lovely and the drawings and backgrounds are well-rendered. In short, well-done animation considering any potential constraints but not great animation. Bill Lava's music is rousingly orchestrated and has a lot of life and isn't repetitive, his work hasn't always worked in the Speedy cartoons but it works wonderfully here and couldn't be more evident in the final gag. The gags are consistent in how funny they are, the wrecking ball and noose gags do provoke a lot of laughs but the highlight is absolutely Coyote's attempts with a boulder and catapult, as has been noted previously instead of moving on to different methods of catching the Roadrunner it was nice to see Coyote making numerous attempts doing the same thing. And even more importantly, the gag isn't just funny, it's hilarious, the last part of it especially. Roadrunner is good, but Coyote has always been the more interesting and funniest of the two and as always he is sly and amusing, but we also feel pangs of sympathy too. To conclude, a very good Roadrunner-Wile E.Coyote cartoon and one of their better outings of the 60s. 7.5/10 Bethany Cox