Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Coyote vs. Acme (2026)

Thank you. Wile E. Coyote. Super genius. I like the way that rolls out.

Wile E. Coyote. Super genius. Wile E. Coyote.

Super genius. The voice you just heard is, in fact, the speaking voice of Mr. Wile E. Coyote. That's Operation Rabbit, a Looney Tunes short from 1952 written by Michael Maltese and directed by Chuck Jones.

Remember those surnames for later. And starring the inimitable Mel Blanc. Although, to be fair, he is, in fact, mostly imitable. And we'll get there, too. Every time I see or even think about Wile E.

Coyote, that's the voice I hear. That's the speech I hear. Wile E. Coyote, super genius. I like the way that rolls out.

And I've been thinking those thoughts and hearing that voice for nigh on 50 years now. Because, Midnight Viewers, they finally made a film focusing on my absolute, no questions asked, put your fucking hands down, favorite Warner Brothers character. And we're going to talk all up and down about him and the matter of Coyote vs. Acme today. Welcome to Father Malone's Weekly Roundup.

I am Father Malone. Here's that trailer. Have you been horribly injured by a product made by the Acme Corporation? It's not your fault. There's probably someone to blame.

The name of the case is Coyote versus Acme. Wiley Coyote. He is reckless. We all know who's responsible, and all of his injuries are self-inflicted. You've been settling Acme cases for years.

I could probably get you 250 bucks for that. This is your opportunity to really show people what you're capable of. These companies think they can do whatever they want. We're sick of it. Acme, you hack you.

Nothing to see here. We really have nothing. We both know it would be very unpleasant if anything. Bigger were to become public. So, uh, what is up, Doc?

The Acme Corporation is releasing this film for account purposes only. We do not condone any of the storylines depicted. If we want to talk Wiley and his current cinematic incarnation and battle with the goon that is David Zaslav at Warner Brothers, we need a bit of history and context. And because it's me, that history starts back in the 1930s, and not at Warner Brothers at all. Across town at MGM, New York transplant Joe Barbera ended up on the other side of a desk with New Mexico native William Hanna.

Hanna was already a director at MGM, having made Bosco's Blue Eggs and Old Smokey and a few other forgettable and forgotten shorts. In 1940, the two collaborated on a short called Puss Gets the Boot. It'd get nominated for an Academy Award and launch the careers of their most famous creations, Tom and Jerry. Over the next decade, they'd turn out 46 theatrical shorts featuring the ever-battling cat and mouse duo and win seven Academy Awards. You know who wasn't winning those awards during the 1940s?

Chuck Jones. Jones was at Warner Brothers and doing great work in his own right. During that same time period, he directed over 80 shorts. Not even a nomination. That's not true.

He got nominated in 1949 for a short featuring two mice being chased by a cat. That same year, he and writer Michael Maltese concocted a direct parody of Tom and Jerry and their mindless violence with The Fast and the Furious. Yes, people loved mindless violence because The Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, that E stands for Ethelbert, by the way, were an instant hit, probably the most popular characters he created. That was until 1963 when Warner Brothers closed down And Chuck Jones found himself employed at MGM, making Tom and Jerry cartoons.

Ah, the delicious irony. And now it makes sense. See, my favorite cartoon character at MGM is Tom, so it only stands to reason my favorite Warner Bros. character is an echo of him. Though while Tom was prone to an occasional blueprint and Rube Goldberg machine, Mr. Coyote made it his entire life.

A beautiful performance piece about ingenuity and futility, and the hope that drives both. Which brings us up to date, and that date is 1996, when The New Yorker published Ian Frazier's satirical piece Coyote vs. Acme, which posited that Wiley had a hell of a case against the manufacturer of all of his faulty roadrunner catching equipment, who had done him egregious harm in the process. Scott Rudin got the rights to the story in 98, but didn't think to, you know, get the rights to the Warner Brothers characters. In 2015, after the rights had lapsed, James Gunn pitched the project to Warners themselves, and a script was developed by Jeremy Slater and Gunn that featured Wiley as a lovable loser who's loyal and like a dog.

And not a villain at all. Thank God in 2018, Warners handed the project to another creative team before finally landing on director Dan Green, who'd already had some experience directing live-action animated hybrids with that god-awful second Ninja Turtles movie. Out of the Shadows or some shit. And, more interestingly, they gave writing duties to Sammy Birch. She wrote May December for Todd Haynes, and wrote and directed a terrific serial killer short called Bev right around this time period.

Not exactly the person Warners of old would have turned to. Well, all hail Irv Spence and the rest of the termite terrorist gods that they did. She couldn't have gotten it more right. I think it's my favorite film of the year. Yeah, it's the best thing I'm gonna see.

I don't care what indie cred darling or amazing performance comes down the pike, this film is the culmination of nearly 80 years of this character and everything he's always stood for. Every schemer you've ever loved on TV and in movies owes a solemn debt to Wile E. Coyote. And his will to succeed in the face of overwhelming failure not only gets dramatized on screen, it ended up spilling out everywhere in a big old meta mess that has been this movie ever since. Fuck David Zaslav.

If I haven't made that clear, that guy can burn. He was an NBC exec who moved over to Discovery, and when they merged with Warner Brothers, he became CEO. $ 3 million a year with $ 22 million in stock. His extension netted him $ 190 million in stock. His only goal was to make the value of the company more in any way he could, including employing a loophole that allowed existing as-yet-unreleased material to be shelved permanently for a tax write-off. This he did to the tune of $ 25 billion off the company's debt, with projects like Batgirl and a ton of television programming and fully finished, ready-to-roll feature films just disappearing, including Coyote vs.

Acme. The common consensus was, as devious as a movie was to shelve the hard work of hundreds if not thousands of people, it was probably because the project itself was bad. Really bad. Unreleasably bad. Which is what Will Forte, star of Coyote vs.

Acme, thought when he sat down to watch what's been labeled the funeral screening, effectively the only time the movie would ever be shown. And that's when it got confusing and everyone got angry, because apparently this wasn't just releasable, it was quite good. So up went the uproar, thank goodness, and every studio was instead invited to screen the film and make a bid to buy it outright. So as mad as Warner Brothers as I am, at least that was just Zaslav being his authentic evil self, every other studio just let this movie dangle. Except for Ketchup.

Who? I've never heard of them either, but I'm going to eat everything with ketchup for the rest of the year in honor of this fucking upstart, who not only saved the film, but they got it in fucking theaters, which is where you need to go. Please see this movie. As the title and trailer and everything I've said so far suggest, this is a film about Wile E. Coyote, the cartoon predator who laughs in the face of failure, who hires an attorney, who is a broken man who fears failure more than death itself, to take on a monolithic corporation in a court battle worthy of old Capra.

Is it better than 12 Angry Men, HP? Yes. Yes, it is. I'm not joking. What makes the movie work so well is that it doesn't devolve below a really good courtroom thriller.

It's about hunting down witnesses and securing evidence and citing precedent as much as it is about dodging anvils and painting working tunnels on walls. Wiley is portrayed as a bit of a broken man himself, coming to grips with the mountain of futility that's faced him. The mountain is quite literal here, with a pile of faulty Acme products. For his entire life, with no end in sight and no justice to even consider. Enter Will Forte, a bit of a human cartoon himself, who acquits himself, and I'm not being hyperbolic, as committed and believable and dedicated as anything Bob Hoskins did back in Roger Rabbit.

That film hovers over this whole production, It's hard not to feel its presence in any project combining animation and live action since Jessica slinked across the stage and Judge Doom unleashed the dip. Nothing has come close. Well, hold on. That Rescue Rangers film is pretty fucking awesome. And that would be a great pairing with Coyote.

That's on Disney +, and I am in fact going to rewatch it just as soon as I edit this episode. I've probably already watched it by now. I can't with good conscience say this film is equal to Roger Rabbit, but fuck man, it's really close. In one area in particular, I think it actually beats The Rabbit. There are a lot of funny performances in this film, and there are a lot of elaborate sight gags that work like gangbusters.

But the one element that had me laughing out loud, which is a big fucking deal, by the way, actually filling the air with spontaneous joy, is actually rarer than you think. The actual funniest part of the movie is Wiley himself. He's silent for the entire film. I tried to track down the lead animator's name, but right now it's all vague art department gobbledygook on IMDB and Wikipedia. But whoever laid out his storyboards and made his character beats is worth their weight in gold.

The coyote made me laugh through gestures and facial expressions. And in one completely fucking hilarious moment, after using Forte's pen to sign a document, He pitches it into the distance with no explanation. It was so odd and so fucking in character. His performance is as good as anything from that Gollum fella. And you know Wiley smells way better.

Stephen Price provided the music here. He did the world's end in Running Man for Edgar Wright. And not only weaves all of the classic Carl Stalling themes into a new cohesive score, at one point, he uses Tchaikovsky but replaces the chorus with beep beep, beep beep, I was howling. You think Space Jam was that clever? No.

Wait, actually, the Space Jam comparison deserves a little exploration, because whatever faults that movie had, mainly it's not a fucking movie at all, the animation was spot fucking on. Every character was on model, whether it was 3D or not, and the continuity was flawless. The Coyote in Coyote vs. Acme is pretty fucking flawless as well, but it kind of ends there. Maybe the Roadrunner.

He's not on screen enough to notice... And Bugs Bunny shows up as a deep throat character and he's 100% 2D and looks great. But the longer I looked at the bizarre 3D, 2D mashup that is Foghorn Leghorn, the more you realize these characters were never meant to spend too much time staring down the barrel of a camera. It's off-putting and jarring to the point that I felt a bit embarrassed by the whole thing. And much love to Eric Bauza, by the way, who is the resident Mel Blanc these days. and as such provides pitch-perfect facsimiles of Daffy Duck and Porky Pig and Tweety and Elmer Fudd.

Maybe somebody else can do Bugs Bunny, though. I'm just thinking out loud. Maybe he needn't do the Peter Lorre mad scientist character, here named Dr. Peter Lorre. And his foghorn langhorn is just passable.

But weirdly, the one that I found off, just wrong, is the Roadrunner. How do you not sound exactly like Mel Blanc's original? Bowser found a way. But these are quibbles, and animation nerd quibbles at that, because for every insignificant problem I had, there were tremendous delights. Like realizing most of the on-the-street stuff with Forte and the Coyote and Lana Condor, who plays the young intern pushing Forte forward, are done handheld.

The blend of animation and live action is so fucking seamless that I didn't even notice it till halfway through the film when Forte and Wily are stumbling around on some Albuquerque street. And again, I was fucking giggling. The audacity to try it and succeed. Kind of like Wiley himself. I refuse to spoil any more than I have.

Suffice it to say that that spirit, the enthusiastic loser, it carries right through to the end. And it is surprisingly emotional. The movie had me bawling. I'm staggered it was a hair's breadth away of becoming cinema mythology. That it could have just gone away.

This is the best animated picture Warner Brothers has made in decades. And the way things are looking, it might be their capstone. It's fitting. It's earned. It's appropriate.

That's the roundup. Thank you to everyone for tuning in and checking out our newest series, Buttons, Switches, and Consoles, a show about old tech I do with Laura Grillo. So far, you've all been digging it. Next episode on the main feed will be the long-slavered-for hackers, so look for that in the coming weeks. Over on the Patreon, we've got a brand new episode of Step Off, the White Rapper Show, and we've got two episodes of Buttons, Switches, and Consoles, Sci-Fi-Suffused Sister Series...

That's Airlocks, Sensors, and Raygun. Also with Laura Grillo, we've got two volumes over there, The Lawnmower Man and now Cherry 2000. So head over and check those out. For Ripley Jean, who's never allowed to see this movie, I'm Father Malone. Try to enjoy the daylight.