One of the things that stuck with me well after the Kool-Aid fuelled blur of my childhood – the succession of carefree summers and plastic superhero death-battles – was that I always hated (and still hate) the Roadrunner.
Yes, that Roadrunner.
I always felt sorry for Wile E. Coyote. Sure, the Roadrunner was “good” while the coyote was “evil”, but how could I root for good when good was such an idiot? Such a mindless automaton whose sole purpose in life was to run, to go “meep meep”, and to miraculously Never Get Eaten.
The Roadrunner was sheer stupidity triumphing over intelligence. Dumb luck trumping planning. Ignorant bliss kicking ambition in the groin again and again and again every Saturday at 9am, Eastern Standard Time.
But the coyote personified all the values our parents told us to hold dear: persistence, planning, adaptability, and contributing to the economy by buying over-priced goods from a mega-corporation. And yet he failed, time and time again, to get a break. Every Saturday I tuned in to watch the coyote getting screwed over by fate. And I have to say, that made an impression on me.
It seemed like cartoons were the adult world’s attempt to lie to kids. To tell us that good was always going to triumph, even if “good” was embodied by a creature as brainless as the Roadrunner. At the tender age of four years old, that pissed me off. I was weird like that.
When I was four, I would have paid my entire 25-cent allowance to see Elmer Fudd actually “kill the wabbit”. I would have gone without cookies for a week just to watch Sylvester roast Tweety Bird rotisserie-style.
And it doesn’t stop with Looney Toons. I rooted for Gargamel. I cheered for the Smoggies. I coaxed Dr. Claw to clobber that numb-skull Inspector Gadget. I hoped desperately that this would be the week Coldheart captured and ATE those damned Care-Bears, to put us all out of our saccharine misery.
I would think that maybe, just maybe, the villains would succeed if they’d all somehow team up. I envisioned an episode where Teddy Ruxpin absent-mindedly remarked that Quellor just didn’t seem to be around today…and it would turn out he was off helping Duke Igthorn ambush the Gummi Bears. And next week, they and Beastor and the Purple Pie Man would rendezvous with Mumm-Ra and Murky Dismal and Skeletor in Smurfland, where they’d apply teamwork and coordinated-badness to catch those blue do-gooders.
One by one, the dimwitted heroes would be captured and destroyed, until stupidity was banished from the universe I visited on Saturday mornings (and sometimes at 4pm on weekdays).
But it never happened. The villains always failed, and stupid reigned supreme. And the children of the world continued to be taught that they could coast through life being cute and mindless.
Meep meep.
That’s all, folks.
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