This is the unofficial end to summer, schools are open again, crazy cultists are celebrating accused killers, and vacations are over, except for the well-paid crowd on Capitol Hill, of course.
An amazing 86 percent of Americans DISapprove of Congress. Nearly nine-in-ten believe government corruption is widespread. Donald Trump isn’t doing that well either.
The listless Democrat Party is, according to polls, coasting anyway to take over at least the House of Representatives come January while its leadership acts as senile and clueless as the presidential carcass they so sincerely lied to cover. Currently, the leading candidate as the Dems' next White House nominee is imagining what can be in two years, unburdened by what has been in two years ago in her election disaster:
"We have to stay woke. Like, everybody needs to be woke. And you can talk about if you're the wokest or woker, but just stay more woke than less woke."
We're marking the quarter-century anniversary of the 9/11 Arab terror attacks now with a Muslim communist governing New York, the nation’s largest city that vowed: “Never Forget!”
But then "Never Forget" got forgotten.
Two-thirds of Americans told Gallup that day permanently changed American life. For nearly 100 million younger Americans, however, that sunny day of hijackings and horror, so severely seared into the memory of the rest of us, is merely another day in history they’ve heard elders painfully recall.
As one result, I am temporarily tired of politics. Today’s column is something different.
There’s a new movie out, “Coyote vs Acme” (movidus humorus). It is live-animation action and fun with a touching conclusion. In a small Alabama theater, I laughed out loud, and I was not alone.
It is, of course, about Wile E Coyote’s never-ending — and ever-failing — attempt to catch the Road Runner. In reality, it is the story of Sisyphus some millennia after the Greek myth was born.
This Coyote episode created new memories for me and brought back many pleasant old ones. But it still felt delightfully fresh with new gags, jokes, seamless cinematic interactions with real humans, and insanely ingenious weapons of destruction that always fail.
We know that but watch anyway, right? Because it’s safe and, just maybe, it will work for once. That’s the eternal hope in life, right? That everything will work out somehow eventually, even though experience suggests otherwise. That's why Charlie Brown still lets Lucy hold the football every fall.
My first cartoon memory was pre-television, Walt Disney’s “Bambi.” Very unpleasant. I never saw the end of it.
When the hunter’s gunshot erupted off-screen, killing the fawn’s mother, I have been told I broke into the loudest, most disruptive scream-crying that ruined the movie experience for everyone in that theater until my ever-patient father hustled me out of there.
Look! I’m sorry that Walt Disney’s mother died in a 1938 gas leak that Disney's repair crew failed to fix properly. But that guilt is no reason for him to inflict the lonely pain of orphanhood on countless generations of innocent children with the fictitious stories of Cinderella, Snow White, Bambi, and Dumbo, whose mother was taken away by, you guessed it, bad men.
Which is why I have relished the coyote and road runner story so much since their first chase in 1948. Chase scenes, of course, are classic movie fodder from Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone Kops to the Lone Ranger, Steve McQueen, Jason Bourne, and Vin Diesel.
But this story also asks the evergreen human question: Do you really want to try and try and try and fail and fail and fail — then maybe try once more because, who knows, this time you might succeed? Hope springs eternal.
It’s all cartoon violence. Nobody dies. Wile E’s ingenious — and inevitably doomed — plots are so earnestly complicated with his own hastily-drawn, detailed blueprints, as you can see below.
We see him getting blown into cinders, crashing into mountains, run over by a truck that appears from nowhere in the desert, opening a parachute to discover only silverware, getting plastered on the front of a speeding train, squished by an anvil falling from the sky, hijacked by malfunctioning rocket skates, and more.
And, of course, the always-hilarious prolonged plunge off a cliff, whistling down and down into a deep, deep canyon to become a tiny puff of dust at the bottom. But Wile E fails to fall until noticing that he’s standing on thin air.
Yet, two seconds after every disaster, Wile E is back at it, as determined and hopeful as ever. God bless him, unpacking a new weapon from ACME Corp to pursue that insolent, tasty-looking bird.
Let’s be honest, in reality, coyotes run faster than roadrunners. And they’re birds, right? They could fly away at any moment if this wasn’t a cartoon.
I have always admired cartoon logic, or the lack thereof.
Elmer Fudd can blast a shotgun into Bugs Bunny’s hole; nobody’s hurt. The Beagle Boys organized-crime family can go all over town wearing robber masks and no one suspects a thing. Tom and Jerry run around naked all week, then don modest swimsuits for the beach.
The premise of the new Coyote movie: Anything that goes wrong is always someone else's fault. Sounds numbingly normal in our litigious society.
There should be consequences for ACME’s faulty products. Wile E hears a TV ad for a personal-injury lawyer: Have you placed TNT on a desert road, but it blows you up? “You may be entitled to compensation.”
It’s a big challenge legally pursuing a giant corporation run by John Cena getting away with shoddy products thanks to the help of other guileless cartoon characters. Remember Foghorn Leghorn, the bombastic rooster?
Of course, the coyote doesn’t give up there either. Even when his lawyer is lazy and inept.
And Wile E’s inability to speak means he can only communicate with instantly produced signs. He gets in some brief courtroom trouble for holding up a sign: “ACME SUCKS.”
I think Wile E’s enduring and intense appeal for me and many others is that the scrawny, underdog canine creature never gives up. No matter what. We admire that in sports, in people battling cancer, and even in politicians. Never say die.
Sassy Sophie Cunningham, for instance. Tim Tebow. Or Donald Trump. Not everyone likes him. He’s made his own mistakes. But what he’s experienced from opponents and media in the past 11 years – the hoaxes, concocted impeachments, indictments and trials, lies, distorted news coverage, malicious leaks – was no cartoon. Yet he endured and emerged victorious.
The ”Coyote vs ACME” movie production has a tortured history, which my friend Kate O’Hare clearly recounts here. Yet like Wile E, its artists and producers didn’t give up. They kept trying and trying, and finally they got their work off the storage shelves at Warner Bros. and out to let movie audiences laugh for a change at a story that doesn't involve some viral apocalypse.
The roadrunner story was created by Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese for Warner Bros. Cartoons. Like many movies, it sprung from literature.
Even if you’ve forgotten your Greek mythology, the coyote’s perpetual quest is Sisyphean. (See also the summer’s international blockbuster based on another Greek tale, the 2,800-year-old “The Odyssey.”)
As a child, Jones read “Roughing It,” where in 1872 Mark Twain described the coyote as “a long, slim, sick, and sorry-looking skeleton…a living, breathing allegory of want. Who could resist such an enchanting creature?"
The cartoon’s creators developed strict rules for both characters: All equipment must come from ACME Corp. Neither character can ever hurt the other. The roadrunner can stop at any time, but can never leave the road. The coyote is only humiliated by his own ineptitude or faulty ACME gear. Gravity is the coyote’s worst enemy.
Neither character ever talks, like the old silent movies that relied on skilled sight gags. The roadrunner’s trademark “Beep! Beep!” came to Jones one afternoon when a coworker, Paul Julian, walked by his office door carrying a tall pile of boxes blocking his view.
Not to be too picky as a forever fan. But to my ears, the roadrunner’s only words sound more like “Meep! Meep!”
That’s much more impudent anyway.
