Wile E got a raw deal

By James Norton

A short time ago, a very close friend and I were talking on the phone about our favorite cartoons, and what we enjoyed about them. My favorites were always the Speedy Gonzalez ones; for some reason, they actually kept me entertained. It might've just been Speedy's reedeeculous accent, or something equally trivial, but I enjoyed them nonetheless. At any rate, as I went on about my adoration for Señor Speedy (and Slowpoke Rodriguez, his slow cousin who packed a pistol) she broke into my narrative and told me that her favorite cartoon character was the roadrunner.

I always HATED that damned roadrunner.

Wile E. Coyote must've been about 750 times more intelligent then that stupid carrion bird. Every time I'd watch one of the roadrunner cartoons, I'd marvel at Wile E.'s efficiency as a predator; just look at the foresight with which he laid his traps, the creativity and effort he'd put into his work, the sheer ELEGANCE of how he would use mechanics and raw animal cunning to set up certain-death situations for his dinner.

And that goddam smartass bird would just get lucky. Again, and again, and again, that obnoxious uppity desert vulture would elude the most finely laid and deadly of traps.

And it wasn't as though the roadrunner was particularly cunning. He'd always eat the magnetized birdseed, or run through the tricky loop, or stop under the tippy rock, or whatever. By all that is holy and right, that moronic featherbrain should've been dead a thousand times over by his own inept and blundering vulnerability. But no. The Powers That Be over at Warner decide, at the last moment, to turn things around and kill the wise and crafty coyote whose hard work had caused such lovely traps to be constructed in the first place.

Now, if the roadrunner was my kind of bird (instead of the sort of hyperactive nitwit imbecile that he was), he'd pay some respect to his fallen foe. None of that tounge-flipping crap. He'd walk over to the Coyote's fallen body, and cry out to the dark heavens above:

Lord, you have struck down a Giant
among Hunters
Truly, O God, you favor me by sparing my blood, and I am unworthy.

Nah. Just a little MEEP-MEEP and FAZZZOOOOM, and he's off to slaughter another incarnation of our hapless and hungry creative genius.

I don't really think my view is that weird; I'll bet some cartoonist agrees with me, and that somewhere in Warner's vaults is the cartoon where the roadrunner actually finally gets killed, butchered, and boiled into delicious nourishing stew.

America deserves to see that cartoon.