Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner

Wile E. Coyote and The Road-Runner are a duo of cartoon characters appearing in the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. The characters themselves were created by director Chuck Jones for Warner Bros. Animation in 1948, while the template for their adventures was the work of screenwriter Michael Maltese. Like all the other Looney Tunes icons, the duo stars in a long-running series of theatrical film-shorts (the first 16 of which were written by Michael) and occasional direct-to-Television cartoons (as can be seen on The Looney Tunes Show).

In each cartoon, Wile, instead of using animal senses and guile, utilizes absurdly complex gizmos (often from ACME, a mail-order company and recurring gimmick in Looney Tunes) and elaborate plans to try to catch his prey, but fails every time. Wile appears separately as an adversary of Bugs Bunny in 5 cartoons from 1952 to 1963: Operation: Rabbit, To Hare Is Human, Rabbit's Feat, Compressed Hare, and Hare-Breadth Hurry. While he is usually silent in the regular Coyote/Road-Runner shorts, he speaks with a refined, ego-maniacal, almost English-sounding accent in these solo outings, provided by Mel Blanc. The Road-Runner speaks only with a signature "beep-beep" noise (recorded by Paul Julian) and an occasional "popping-cork" tongue noise.

To date, 48 cartoons have been made featuring these cartoons (including the computer-animated shorts), most of which were directed by Chuck.

Creation
Chuck based Wile on Samuel Clemens' book Roughing It, in which Samuel describes the coyote as "a long, slim, sick, sorry-looking skeleton" and "a living, breathing allegory of Want. He's always hungry." Chuck said he created the Coyote/Road-Runner series as a means of parodying traditional "cat-and-mouse" cartoons like Tom & Jerry (which the director was to work on later in his career, ironically enough).

Wile E.'s name is an obvious pun on the word "wily." His middle initial, "E," is said to stand for "Ethelbert" in 1 issue of Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies Comics, but its cartoonist didn't intend to make it apart of official continuity. Early model sheets for the character prior to his debut (Fast & Furry-ous) identify him as "Don Coyote," a pun on Don Quixote.

Scenery
The desert scenery in the first 2 Road-Runner cartoons was designed by Robert Gribbroek and was quite realistic. In most later cartoons, the scenery was designed by Maurice Noble, who made it far more abstract. Several different styles were used.