Dr. Toon: War and Pieces
At some point during 1956, the same year in which the above cartoon featuring the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote made its debut, a North Vietnamese commander named Ho Chi Minh led his Cong-san forces against South Vietnam for the first time. Roughly translated, Cong-san meant Communist; from this term came the phrase “Viet Cong”. Virtually no one in America was then familiar with this appellation, but over the next decade that would change drastically. Among those who knew the term well were President Dwight Eisenhower and his successor John F. Kennedy.
Although Eisenhower backed French forces against the Cong-san with several billion dollars, Kennedy decided to make a deeper commitment against Communist forces in Southeast Asia. The young president strongly felt the need to make such a move. The year 1962 featured a failed invasion of Cuba by U.S.-trained insurgents. The previous year, East Germany erected one of the most visible symbols of the Cold War, the infamous Berlin Wall. As Kennedy himself put it, “Now we have a problem making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.”
By the time director Chuck Jones made his 23rd Road Runner and Coyote film, there were nearly 17,000 Americans in South Vietnam serving as “advisors.” When Jones left the series in 1964, America’s involvement in Vietnam was roughly a year away from commencing its overt military phase. Millions more would be mobilized in the coming years, and when all was said and done, some 58,000 of them would die in combat. During the carnage, Rudy Larriva directed most of the Road Runner’s remaining adventures, but Jones’ imprimatur was already well established.
Chuck Jones, with his Road Runner cartoons, unwittingly predicted the terms under which the Cold War was waged during the late 1950s through the 1980s. No other animation director formulated a more precise or timely picture of America’s agonies in Vietnam. The Road Runner and Coyote also serve as an eerie analogy to the current war in Iraq, but even more eerie is the fact that Chuck Jones never intended for his Roadrunner cartoons to serve this purpose.
The Cold War was an inescapable fact of American life that influenced every nuance of the country’s collective consciousness, and perhaps, on some level, that of Jones as well. In his book Hollywood Cartoons (1999), animation historian Michael Barrier noted: “The Road Runner cartoons were perhaps the most consistently violent of all the Warner Bros. cartoons… “ Perhaps that was because they were the most fitting metaphor for warfare. In fact, the title I chose for this month’s column is that of Jones’ final Road Runner cartoon as a Warner employee.
From the full-blown fear of nuclear Armageddon to the subtle paranoid ideations of a free world steadily nibbled away by stealth and espionage, Americans lived their lives against a steady, unsettling background of Them vs. Us. The Road Runner series was born and continued amidst several seismic shocks administered to the free world. The first Road Runner/Coyote film, Fast and Furry-ous, arrived in 1949, the year that China went Communist and the Soviet Union exploded their first nuclear weapon. The series’ second short (Beep Beep) premiered in 1952 during the height of the Red Scare.
Chuck Jones was an extremely intelligent individual who certainly took notice of the world around him. According to Jones, he was attempting to create a parody of stereotypical chase cartoons; what he coincidentally did was create a metaphor for the questionable strategies of war in the era of the Unthinkable… with superpowers in the role of the Coyote. More specifically, Jones foresaw the results of warfare fought when superpowers faced far weaker but determined guerilla enemies who believed that their survival was at stake. Take note that America was not unique in taking on the role of the Coyote: the Soviet Union, in all its monolithic strength, met defeat at the hands of Afghanistan’s rag-tag, resourceful mujahdeen in the 1980s.
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