Friday, April 3, 2009

Road Runner Round-up

If there's one thing we've discovered over the course of running this blog, it's the fact that the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote may be the most-used characters in the Warner Bros. canon for commercials and other "Misce-Looneyous" material. Here are a couple of fun bits I'll bet a lot of readers here have never seen before.

First up, here's a special that Cartoon Network made back when they showed Looney Tunes (seems like forever ago, doesn't it?) They actually got the major network football pre-game commentators (Len Dawson,Chris Collinsworth, Nick Buoniconti and Jerry Glanville, who is more cartoonish than Wile E. himself!) to do commentary on a marathon of Road Runner cartoons back in 2000. It was, of course, part of a yearly series of "Big Game" marathons designed to compete with the Super Bowl. They also did "Tom Vs. Jerry", 'Sylvester vs. Tweety" and "Bugs vs. Daffy" in the same fashion. Sadly, the clips we found only included the "pre-game" stuff...there was also a full cartoon with football-style play-by-play commentary by John Madden and Pat Summerall! But enjoy what we DID find:





And now for more Road Runner. Did you buy the "Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 2" DVD set a few years ago? No? Shame on you! In fact, (expletive deleted) you! But if you want to own the original "Adventures of the Roadrunner" on DVD, that is where you will find it. This was originally a TV pilot created in 1962, shortly before Chuck Jones was let go from Warner Bros. for moonlighting on a UPA-produced feature film called "Gay Purr-ee". The pilot was not used for TV after all, instead it was released as a featurette in theaters, and later re-edited and re-scored into three shorts. The first of these, "To Beep or Not To Beep", was released theatrically, the other two, "Zip Zip Hooray" and "Roadrunner A Go Go" done for TV. The difference is, there is footage in the pilot that was never used in the three shorts, and Milt Franklyn died before the shorts were edited, so the shorts were redubbed by Bill Lava. You'll recognize a lot of this footage if you have seen the three shorts, but there is much more to it. If you don't own Golden Collection 2, go find a copy and buy it!



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Beep-Beep! Zipthang!

Zia Silvy!!! said...

talking about the huge numbers of RR ads, does anyone reminds the 1999's Nissan's Micra one?
It was a series of three films featuring a couple of looney tunes charachters driving the car;
In the one I cited, there was Wile E. who reached to get the Road Runner, but after answering to a Bugs Bunny's phone call, the bird reached to escape! Wonder if it was just known in Europe and not in the US...

Anonymous said...

I put up some footage of the Bugs/Daffy(pregame/actual "game") on my Market42Fan channel. The Coyote/Road Runner one was the only one of those "Big Game" specials I didn't have.

Pseudothink said...

@Market42Fan: Thanks so much! I've been looking for that for years, ever since I saw it by random chance when it aired. I caught your Tweety vs. Sylvester too. All that's left is to hope that the full Coyote/Road Runner show gets posted sometime, would love to see it. Classic stuff.

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