I Find the Road Runner Narrative Unfair

As a young boy, I felt comforted by the Saturday morning Road Runner cartoon routine. When I became a teenager, I felt the premise of an uncatchable bird was highly disturbing and unreasonable.

Yes, for a very young me, something was fascinating about the relentless chase through the desert landscape, with Wile E. Coyote’s elaborate schemes ending in spectacular failure.

With the coyote playing the evil character in these short, good-versus-bad-cliches, the predictability of the outcome was soothing: the Road Runner would beep, speed away, and the Coyote would inevitably fall off a cliff, get flattened by an anvil, or be blasted by his faulty contraptions. It was humorously repetitive and offered a sense of stability in my childhood.

However, as I transitioned into my teenage years, my perspective on these beloved characters shifted. I started to recognise an unsettling imbalance between the two.

The Coyote’s relentless pursuit seemed less like villainy and more like a tragic quest, while the Road Runner’s effortless evasion and mocking “beep beep” took on a sinister edge. The Road Runner began to seem less like a plucky underdog and more like a bully, constantly outsmarting and humiliating the Coyote, who, despite his many flaws, was undeniably tenacious and inventive.

This realisation made watching the cartoons a more frustrating experience. The Coyote’s failures, once a source of humour, now felt unjust. Each fall, each anvil, and each explosion added to my growing sense of discomfort. Why couldn’t the Coyote catch a break, just once?

It seemed increasingly unfair that his hard work and creativity were always met with disaster while the Road Runner sailed through life unscathed and smug.

Now, as an adult, whenever I come across the Road Runner show, I cringe, yearning for a narrative shift.

My heart desperately wants the Coyote to succeed, to finally catch that elusive bird. I wish for a moment where his perseverance is rewarded. Wile E. Coyote sits down to a hearty meal of Road Runner without an anvil, cliff, or a plume of dust to close out the story. He gets to live happily ever after his way.

It’s a small, perhaps trivial, desire, but it speaks to a deeper longing for fairness and dark justice, even in the realm of cartoons. Maybe, just once, the underdog—or, in this case, the under-coyote—could come out on top.

–Michael.

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