There They Go-Go-Go!

There They Go-Go-Go! is a 1956 Warner Bros. cartoon in the "Looney Tunes" series featuring Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner.

Plot

Wile E. Coyote, apparently famished, wads up a bunch of mud to make a lookalike chicken. He roasts it in an adobe oven, then sits down to "eat" it, with less than perfect results. So he makes a second fixture - a trash can - and throws the "chicken" in it, proving he is indeed "Famishus Fantasticus". The Road Runner ("Dig-outius Tid-bittius") bowls everything over, starting the chase. Wile takes a straight-line shortcut instead of the road to catch up. Before Wile can come close, however, the Road Runner sets the road on fire with his blinding speed, causing Wile to burn his feet. He stomps out the fire on his paws, but finds his tail is also burning. Wile, thinking fast, witches for water to cool his tail off. The coyote rages at the camera, but nothing can be done except plan the next scheme.

Wile uses his frequent idea: swing from a high place armed with a javelin, looking to spear the Road Runner. This time, he simply plows into the ground as the Road Runner calmly passes on the right.

The coyote stuffs a gun on a spring into a ground compartment and locks it with a safety lock, hoping to shoot his enemy, but due to the excessive spring force, the gun does a 180 and ends up on the opposite side of the coyote, upside down, but pointed in his face. Wile can only plug the barrel with a finger before getting blasted in the face. Then, the gun returns to the hole in the ground, pulling its owner with it.

Wile attaches himself to a tree catapult to throw himself towards a passing Road Runner, but instead he bounces himself on the ground and suffers repeating back and forth faceplants as the tree continually stretches to either side.

To block the Road Runner, the coyote attaches a bunch of maces to a string and pole, and unwinds the string when he hears the bird approaching. It's an effective obstacle, and would have stopped the Road Runner except that the pole lifted itself out of the ground and dropped itself on the hiding coyote before the Road Runner made it past. Wile is battered and tied up by the end of the fracas.

This time, the coyote uses deception. He posts a detour and bridges a crevasse with a ladder that he has sabotaged with a cut in the structure, which will make it collapse if passed over. He hears the Road Runner, but doesn't see him, and he looks up to see the Road Runner safely perched on top of a high cliff, watching his every move. The angry coyote uses his own broken ladder to climb up to the top, with predictably disastrous results. Wile falls into the canyon, grabs onto the second section of the ladder to alleviate the fall, and he continues into the ground and through each rung on the way down.

Now, Wile loads a circle of explosives into the center of a tire, and rolls the tire down a hill to meet the Road Runner. Unfortunately, the explosives stay behind and blow up their user.

The coyote is loaded into a massive rocket to chase the Road Runner, but when he sets it off, instead of launching the rocket, he only launches himself out of the rocket and through a rock face. He emerges from the resulting hole, blackened.

The final gag in this cartoon involves a pack of rocks from on high, ready to fall on the Road Runner when the trap door opens. But when Wile opens the trap door, no rocks fall because they're too densely packed. So Wile first runs to the top and stomps on them (no dice), then procures a long, thin stick and uses it like an ice pick to force them out. Pebbles, then stones, then rocks fall. Wile finally comes to his senses and raises a sign: "IN HEAVEN'S NAME - WHAT AM I "DOING"?" Too late. Wile raises an umbrella to prepare for the resulting impact of huge rocks, and after the impact, a long lump forms on the Coyote's head with a white flag making the lump look like a flagpole. The flag reads "THE END" while it waves in the wind, accompanied by the song, "Taps".

Trivia

* Most of the score from this cartoon was released on "The Carl Stalling Project" in 1990.

ee also

*Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies filmography (1950-1959)