Hardly a day goes by without someone saying, in reference to an edgy piece of pop culture, “They could never make that today.” It almost seems as if some people like saying that too much — as if they secretly approve of the fact. But in certain cases, there’s simply no denying the truth of it. If someone at Nickelodeon today, or the Disney Channel or the Cartoon Network, tried to program a series of animated shorts as violent and anarchic and demented and sadomasochistic as the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons created and (mostly) directed by Chuck Jones, starting in 1949, that person might be called up on charges.
That, of course, is exactly why those cartoons were impossibly great. To those of us who grew up on them, watching Wile E. Coyote do everything in his power to catch and kill the Road Runner gave off a charge of reckless endangerment that was hilarious and cathartic. It was also disarmingly casual. Every time Wile E. got blown to smithereens by a faulty detonator, or dropped 1,000 feet off a cliff to a distant puff-of-smoke crash landing, we experienced the comedy of pure aggression — and the comedy of ironic resilience. That Wile E. always bounced right back in the next scene lent the crazed destruction a weirdly optimistic undercurrent.
