How a Story In The New Yorker Became A Movie

RJ Writing Ink’s Retelling of the Story of Coyote vs ACME, Part 2: Ian Frazier’s Story

All good stories and ideas have to start somewhere. Nothing is ever created in a vacuum, because ideas come from our collective experiences. And Coyote vs ACME was no exception.

I’m RJ Writing Ink, and welcome to part two of my series on the story of Coyote vs ACME, all leading up to a spoiler review of the film.

Say Hello to Ian Frazier

Meet Ian Frazier: Harvard graduate, humorist, and a contributor to The New Yorker for decades. He has also been a lifelong fan of the Looney Tunes, having grown up watching them as a kid. However, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the seeds of what would become Coyote vs ACME were planted. According to an interview, he was going through his parents’ stuff as one of the executors of their estate when he found some cassettes of Looney Tunes cartoons and wound up watching them. At the same time, he was reading his parents’ will and thought about how most people never read legal language. The two thoughts combined, and just like that, the concept for Coyote vs ACME was born. He typed it up on an old typewriter, sent it to The New Yorker in January 1990, and the rest is history.

While the original essay is available on The New Yorker itself, since I didn’t have a subscription, I had to find it elsewhere. Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, I was able to do so pretty easily, and I am more than happy to provide a link. I urge you to read the essay for yourself, but I will discuss the cliff notes here.

This is a good Story!

Framed as a court document, the short story is the opening statement of Wile E. Coyote’s attorney, who explains how they are suing ACME for damages. According to the story, Wile E. had purchased ACME products at least eighty-five separate times through their mail-order catalog. And every single time he did so, those products would end up failing, causing him severe bodily harm, and thus restricting his ability to perform his job.

Yes. While some of us might consider Wile E. unemployed, the story treats his natural role as a predator as his profession. The film touches on this in the third act, which I appreciate.

The story then explains examples of how ACME’s products have backfired on Wile E. Coyote. This includes describing, in great detail, the injuries that he suffered as a result, such as being squashed like an accordion, or hitting a billboard so hard it left a hole in the shape of his body.

A Deconstructive Parody of Amusing Injuries

None of this is anything new or mind-blowing to longtime Looney Tunes fans. We’ve seen the kind of injuries Wile E. has gotten over his almost-eighty long years of trying to catch the Road Runner. We’re supposed to laugh at them, since we know that he can shrug them off like most Tunes. However, this is where the story shows off its brilliance as a deconstructive parody.

TV Tropes defines “deconstructive parody” as something that mocks the ridiculous and lets it happen, but also shows the consequences if it happened in real life. In this short story, Frazier emphasized that while Wile E. could recover from all his injuries, that didn’t change the fact that they still hurt. They still cost him a lot of time and money thanks to the medical bills. In addition to that, it also cites how these injuries and his inability to do his job or even have a social life. Which is also true: Wile E. Coyote doesn’t have many real friends or family! The worst part, though, is that since the rules of his cartoons state that he can only use ACME products, framed here and in the film as them holding a near-monopoly on what he uses, he has to keep using them. He has to keep using something that he knows will fail him at best, or hurt him at worst.

It doesn’t sound so funny anymore, does it?

What a Hilarious Story!

This was honestly such a brilliant piece of writing. It takes what we are supposed to see as funny about Wile E. and the Road Runner, and reframes it in the context of the real world. The humor stems from the fact that something so ridiculous is being taken so seriously, and I think that’s one of the funniest things you can do with anything. An actual attorney even joined in on the joke by writing a response, pretending to represent ACME and making the same argument that Buddy Crane would use in the film: that Wile E. was reckless and the injuries he received were all of his own making. And to be fair, they wouldn’t be wrong. Even though it wouldn’t be until he revealed them in his autobiography in 1999, Chuck Jones’ rules for the Coyote and Road Runner state that if the ACME products weren’t at fault, then Wile E. ‘s mistakes were to blame. The fact that neither Frazier nor the other writer knew this also adds a bit of irony.

In my personal opinion, both Frazier and this response really understood the core of who Wile E. Coyote is. They’re both right about him: he is reckless, and when it isn’t the fault of ACME’s products, it will be his own mistakes. Jones even made a rule that says so! However, that doesn’t change the fact that the ACME products still fail. At the end of the day, Wile E. is still compelled by the heavens themselves to keep chasing the Road Runner with bad products. He is in the same boat that Sisyphus was, and like I said before, while it’s funny, it gets to the point where we, the audience, get up and say, “That’s enough! What did the Coyote do to deserve this kind of punishment?” Because as I already established, from our perspective today, what the gods did to Sisyphus is cruel and an overreaction to a guy who made them look bad. What kind of god are you if you let yourself be swayed into doing something so…human?

So, yeah. Let’s have Sisyphus sue the gods. Just replace Sisyphus with Wile E. Coyote and make ACME the gods, and we’ve got Coyote vs ACME. And like the Coyote’s self-appointed goal of catching the Road Runner, getting it made into a movie was almost a Sisyphean task unto itself. But more on that in part three!