He missed. There’s that old quick drying cement gag. The grenade, manhole cover, grenade gag is wonderfully chiasmic. Drag, foiled. It might be unseemly to mention it, but look at the coyote’s left breast.
Here’s one of the first of those 2-D/3-D, illusion/reality gags, that they’ll use so often in the series. The Coyote paints the realistic mural, which the roadrunner enters, and out of which the truck comes and ploughs him. Of course, when he tries to join in, he breaks through the canvas and plummets to his—well.
The big rolling boulder! The music, the montage, the build and climax are all so perfectly judged. When they lay out the cleaner, the balloon and the anvil for us there at the end, they are, once again, demonstrating the techniques of modernism and of epic theatre. These are the components of our content, and these are the tools with which we will communicate it. Joke, and the mechanics thereof. Of course, it works! Monumental stuff.