Wile E. Coyote

Director Chuck Jones said the Coyote-Road Runner collaborations were all about how many ways you can't catch a Road Runner. Yet Wile E. Coyote (Carnivorous vulgaris), a scrawny, tragic genious, is a fast-food fanatic. A brilliant inventor, Wile E. made the ACME company rich and famous by buying the tools for elaborate devices intended to trap his elusive prey, the Road Runner. Failure never deters his obsessive nature, and he pays a high price for this fatal flaw. All the TNT, disguised brick walls, hidden cliffs, and launched boulders come back to splat Wile E. Yet because of his high energy, single minded devotion to winning, he scrapes himself up time and time again to go back to the drawing board. Wile E. landed his first acting job in 1949's Fast and Furry-ous, but wasn't seen again until 1952 when he returned in pursuit of the elusive Road Runner. Ever starved for victory, the great American anti-hero has starred in 42 animated films

Chuck Jones on the Wile E. cartoons: "It began as a parody and ended as a paradigm. Like much eles in the Road Runner series, plans just seem to backfire. "Mike and I thought it would be funny to do a parody of chase cartoons," said Chuck Jones, referring to the writer Michael Maltese, "because everybody was always chasing everybody eles-dogs chasing cats, cats chasing mice. Then we would become the Dean Swifts of our day. So, as Mike said, we tried things like an anteater chasing a dugong, a giraffe chasing a snail-things like that. But we realized that there's logic at work in chases like cats and mice; they're natural adversaries, so you don't have to esablish their motivations."

"So we tried a more logical chase. I came up with coyotes because I had read Mark Twain's "Roughing It" when I was a kid, and he has a whole chapter on the coyote-what kind of person the coyote actually is. And he also has a chapter on jack rabbits, in which he gives a discription of their speed. That's what gave me the clue to the speed of the roadrunner: I thought the roadrunners-they're all over southern California-and then i remembered how fast Twain said the jackrabbit is. The roadrunner seemed funny, anyway-a bird that runs. They're like flying fish on land.

If you want to see some real coyote's go here.

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