When I was a kid I loved Looney Tunes cartoons. We all watched them after school. There wasn’t much else on TV in those days, but that meant they were a shared joy, to be discussed in the schoolyard the next day and the funniest lines re-enacted, such as when Bugs Bunny (my favourite), on his way to a Miami vacation, pops up out of the ground next to a sign saying ‘Tasmania’ and says, in his inimitable Bronx/Brooklyn accent: ‘Where the hell is Tasmania? I noo I shoulda toined left at Alba-koikee!’ Actually, it WAS an imitable accent. We all did our best to imitate it, as we did that of big southern rooster Foghorn Leghorn, who had a store of earthy epithets that could have been coined by LBJ: ‘That boy’s about as sharp as a laundry-bag full of wet leather’.* (They say it was LBJ who made the pithy observation about political parties and power that it was ‘better to be inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.’)
In those more innocent days we all – boys and girls alike – had a soft spot for the perpetually unlucky-in-love French skunk Pepe Le Pew, who’s since been cancelled, alas, because of his propensity to make repeated unwanted sexual advances to female pussycats he mistakes for lady skunks. But he had a wonderful cod French accent that was great fun to imitate and that wasn’t matched onscreen until John Cleese did his French knight taunting King Arthur from the battlements in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Ah, the good old days when you were still allowed to have fun with stereotypes!
The Looney Tunes cartoons – a Warner Brothers creation – were the best. They weren’t just for kids, like Disney and Hanna-Barbera cartoons. There was something slyly satirical and knowing about them, and the characters were so funny and colourful : Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester the Cat, Speedy Gonzales…just about everyone from my generation still loves them and can ‘do’ their schtick.
Wile E Coyote and the Roadrunner were my least favourite Looney Tunes characters because the gags were all visual, not verbal. There was no Bugs-style wisecracking and I grew tired of Coyote’s repeated failure to catch that damn bird, who was a bit too smug for my liking anyway. I also didn’t like seeing poor old Coyote constantly injured by ACME Corporation products.
In 1990 The New Yorker published a satirical article by journalist Ian Frazier, detailing the pleadings in a product liability lawsuit brought by Wile E Coyote’s against ACME corporation. It was – it IS – a scream. He’s taken the scenarios of each of the roadrunner cartoons and sets out in precise legalese the nature of ACME’s default and the harm and suffering occasioned to the plaintiff, who’s purchased those products in good faith pursuant to his occupation as ‘predator’.
This movie is inspired by that article.
Disheartened by years of failure to catch the roadrunner, Wile retreats to his cave and is on the verge of giving up altogether, but one day in Albuquerque (a nod to Bugs) he sees one of those billboards you do see all over the US advertising the services of a lawyer. ‘Crushed by falling anvils? Piano explode in your face? Ever set a stack of TNT on the road hoping to blow up your prey and having the detonator blow up in your face? You may be entitled to compensation!’
He duly makes an appointment to see small-town lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte), who specialises in obtaining small settlements for cartoon injuries. He’s got a small office staff that includes his niece (Lana Condor), an idealistic and energetic recent Law School graduate keen to start righting wrongs. She’s the office intern.
They face huge obstacles in mounting their case: producing evidence, finding witnesses and above all dealing with the might of ACME, a cartoonishly evil corporation that will stop at nothing to protect its brand.
The cast is a mixture of real humans and our favourite Looney Tunes characters. John Cena (the only ‘name’ actor I recognised) plays ruthless head corporate lawyer Buddy Crane. He offers paltry sums in settlement, but Wile has discovered his inner badass and insists they go the whole hog, especially when the team uncovers a nefarious conspiracy behind the product failures – ‘Operation Sisyphus’.
Foghorn Leghorn, who we remember fondly as big lazy slob forever trying to schmooze his way into Miss Prissy’s neat warm house, having let his own fall into disrepair, has found his true metier as a greedy corporate tycoon and has become the CEO of ACME.
Elmer Fudd is a US senator presiding over a congressional inquiry. Despite his funny voice he’s taking the job seriously and somehow doesn’t look out of place in the middle of his solemn human counterparts.
Tas – ‘Mr Devil’– makes a brief courtroom appearance as a witness for ACME but he’s not much use to them as he still only talks crazed gibberish. He’s introduced as ACME’s ‘master of spin’ – geddit? – and I reckon he’s only in the movie so they could use that gag!
The ever streetwise and savvy Bugs Bunny offers Deep-Throat style info. Daffy Duck has become terminally daffy thanks to ACME’s malfeasance and has ended up in St Looney’s Asylum (which I thought was a refreshingly un-PC joke), but he manages to offer up a clue which leads them to Granny. Remember? She’s the owner and protector of Tweety Bird against the depredations of Sylvester the Cat. Tweety is working as a spy for ACME, under threat that they will do something nasty to Granny if he doesn’t.
Granny is grieving for her sweetheart Dr Lorre, who’s been ‘disappeared’ by ACME after trying to blow the whistle on Operation Sisyphus. He’s modelled on Peter Lorre, the famous Hungarian-American actor. I wondered what he was doing in this story and I had to google to learn that Lorre was frequently parodied in 1940s Warner Bros cartoons. And there I was thinking I knew all the references! He turns up here as a fun, nostalgic Easter egg for longtime fans.
There’s one delicious Easter Egg I didn’t miss. As in the New Yorker article, plaintiff Coyote is described as having the occupation of ‘predator’. In the movie proceedings, ACME’s legal team challenges the idea that being a predator can be said to be an occupation. Kevin Avery counters that there is binding legal precedent for this, citing the case of Sylvester vs. Gonzales, and the judge agrees.
Fun is had with corporate-speak, such as ACME’s in-house categorisation of Wile E Coyote as ‘a high usage individual’ – a prolific consumer prone to serial complaining about faulty products in order to extract money from the company.
Coyote vs Acme is full of such wit and humour. It’s not just the references to the Looney Tunes characters; it plays with the tropes and the lingo of courtroom dramas, cop shows, political thrillers, horror movies, detective dramas, corporate exposes and buddy movies.
I just loved it. Haven’t laughed so much at a movie in …living memory!
*They say it was LBJ who made the pithy observation about political parties and power that it was ‘better to be inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.’