Man! Some of these films are as good as films can possibly be. Most of these films, actually. It’s a really remarkable, absolutely historic series.
Scrambled Aches. Get it? I love their titles!
All these concoctions, contraptions, devices! Repeatedly, creators and their creature alike take trouble, develop and utilize technologies far above what the problem, decency or human happiness require. This edition’s particularly jointed and elaborate anvil joke is a good case in point. At the end, in the end the coyote awaits his fate, passively or patiently, pathetically or heroically. Which is it? Both and all, phenomenologically or in fact. He’s not hardly even a character any more. A monument, more like.
Dehydrated boulders, eh? There’s something of an innovation in this steam roller gag. We didn’t see the coyote set it up this time—cf. Robert Flaherty and the Inuits’ igloo!—so we share the roadrunner’s surprise and uncertainty as the thing unfolds. Or the surprise and uncertainty he might have if he weren’t infallible. Another way to put it is that we know what’s going to happen, but, as with genre or higher education or a religion in which you believe most abidingly, we are just as equally interested in seeing how the foreseen thing is actually going to work itself out. And pay itself off; these jokes!