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The 9 rules every Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon had to follow are wonderfully pedantic

'No dialogue ever, except "beep-beep!"

Christopher Hooton
Thursday 05 March 2015 17:20 GMT
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The simplicity of Looney Tunes was what made their films so great and it was very deliberate, as this set of rules for making Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons shows.

While more modern cartoons have broken the fourth wall and dabbled with live-action to keep things interesting, Road Runner just hammered you over the head with the same joke time and time again.

Rules included Wile E. Coyote nearly always being thwarted by gravity, Road Runner having an incredibly limited vocabulary and the action being never allowed to leave the Arizona desert.

(Picture: Warner Bros) (Warner Bros)

The list comes from the 1999 autobiography of former Looney Tunes animation director and Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist, and was shared to thousands of retweets by director Amos Posner this week.

It's great to see how obsessive people can be about their art, as was the case with Wes Anderson's very specific projection instructions for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

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