This title inspires me, and I don’t even quite know what it means! This is the 5th entry in this series. Now the Coyote is eating bugs and tin cans. And we start out with him. Is he the protagonist? Even further, are we now sort of expected to sympathize with him? That many-legged run of his gives us a new demonstration of how animation works. “How to Build a Burmese Tiger Trap.” More punishing logic—unfortunately, he catches a Burmese tiger with it. The best of these cartoons feature a lovely balance of anything goes and, if we want to be pretentious, strict dialectic. It’s one thing after another, ‘til the coyote’s destruction, and us sort of healed by his stripes.
There’s the primordial child image of that huge, street wide metal panel. They’re not just dealing with the intractability of objects, but with creation being subject to the elements. Earth, air, fire, water, things made by the Acme corporation—they all end up punishing us. And, as done in these cartoons, they do it so prettily, so artfully! There’s a great, impossible back and forth, in and out with those railroad tracks. A couple of good short ones. As with Zipping Along, this has one of those High Diving Hare impossibilities, where the poor sap cuts the limb, as it were, and the whole world falls about his ears. We close satisfyingly with that old ACME triple-strength fortified leg muscle vitamins ploy.