From traps as simple as catching the Road Runner in a cooking pan or clobbering him with a mallet to schemes as complicated as swinging after him with a harpoon while suspended from a balloon or one of director Chuck Jones’s longest and most involved Rube Goldberg this-hits-that devices (designed to drop a cannonball on his prey), the best laid plans of the coyote go oft awry. So do such evil-minded ideas as placing birdseed on the train tracks and dropping a grand piano from a precipice (this results in Wile E. falling to the road below- along with the piano- and ending up with 88 teeth!). Even simple wires, the kind which connect dynamite sticks to their control boxes, conspire against Wile E., rolling backward so that the TNT follows him.
