Let me set the scene: Wile E. Coyote has finally outsmarted the Road Runner with one his of fiendishly thought out blue-printed plans. This time around, he has acquired a perfect size ACME helicopter fast enough to chase down his meal. He puts an anvil in the bottom of the helicopter to balance the weight, to stay low to the road. Soon he is in a high-speed chase down the road with Roadrunner. He opens the glass hatch, with his fork in hand, when suddenly he hits the brick wall of a tunnel. After crashing to the ground, the anvil, once in the helicopter, inexplicably falls on the head of the discombobulated Coyote. Merely seconds later he is run over by a truck, driven by none other than the Roadrunner.
Their chase is a classic philosophical one, a cat and mouse chase. With the Road Runner always stymieing the success of the Coyote's complex, Rube Goldberg type attempts to defeat his opponent through technology. They are essential viewing these cartoons as they exemplify ideas of morals, philosophy, of the role of science and nature, plus there's hilarious violence of the acceptable comedic violence that negates the accepted social convention when it comes to what children can watch on television.
The Coyote is ruled by his desire, to catch the Road Runner. But what happens when he does? The Road Runner is living the good life, the coyote is enslaved to his urges, his Eros according to Plato. He can be seen as a philosophical benchmark for children. Despite all his failures he never gives up on trying to achieve his goal, trying to catch that damn bird, keep trying new ideas and new methods. And some may see is overall goal as dark and nefarious, after all he is trying to kill what in the cartoon is essentially another sentient being, but it does illustrate (no pun intended) basic concepts of the natural world, this food chain hierarchy of predator and prey.
Another example of this idea of relentless desire to achieve a goal in animated form would be Pinky and the Brain, and this is reflected upon in every cartoon:
Murder and world domination are hardly things we want children to be learning about, which is obviously why they never succeed. After all what would you rather be telling your kids, world domination is possible? In reality I think what these cartoons display is the idea to quit whilst your ahead, that perseverance is admirable but that you can't take it too far.
But then again they are still full of violence, but of an acceptable kind. If we showed kids a real life person dropping an anvil on another person we'd be thrown in jail: a) For setting up and filming one guy killing another guy and b) because their are laws preventing young children from seeing that sort of violence, even if they inevitably find ways of seeing it anyway. I remember seeing The Running Man as a kid and being reminded of the Looney Tunes.
The violence is in cartoons is so absurd, but I think it's only because that the road runner always survives and that the coyote always comes back, despite being run over by trucks, cars, trains again and again, being squashed, slammed, smacked into walls, cliffs and the ground that we ignore what in real life would be very serious incidents.
The Coyote finally gets the Road Runner, but realises without him, he lacks purpose- Yet another example of binary opposition?
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