Last night, on its USA opening day, a bunch of us piled into two cars and over-anxiously drove them right into the movie theatre where Coyote vs. Acme was having its local premiere. No, we had not become terrorist cartoon characters. Into the theatre in that it was the Warwick Drive-In, a 3-screen outdoor movie theatre 20 minutes from us. We like drive-ins (all that nostalgia for bygone days), but being in separate vehicles for a comedy does put a dent in that whole laughter-is-contagious thing. 
Those of you who have been following the history of this project know that the movie, based on a quite short 1990 humor piece by Ian Frazier in The New Yorker, was actually completed in 2023, but instead of releasing it, Warner decided to can it so as to use the loss as a $30 million tax write-off. Ain’t mega corporations grand? he said sarcastically. Outrage from the artists themselves ensued, a movement grew, and Warner was pressured to at least try to find a distributor for it. The controversy and the negative publicity for Warner resulted in good publicity for the movie, and a small, independent distributor, Ketchup Entertainment, decided to go all in. All of which is ironic because the plot of the movie, which actually references the Sisyphus myth, is totally Little Guy vs. Big
Guy, with Big Guy a really big, arrogant, all-powerful corporation. There’s more to it than that, but I already wrote about it and other must-read Wile E. Coyote history in a post last September, Coyote vs. Acme: from Humor Piece to Completed Movie to Abandoned Movie to “Opening August 2026”
And what did I think about it? Well… just a minute, just a minute… first three amusingly relevant videos:
1. Me & Wile E. and my Trick Doors
I was always a Looney Tunes fan and never had the slightest interest in the cornball Disney characters. My favorite was Daffy Duck, and my sons were raised accordingly. When the great Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones came to Tower Books around the corner from us to autograph copies of his book, Chuck Amuck, I of course took the boys and he signed ours “to the Daffy Family.” Perfect.
And when Fred Yockers and I did school shows, we somehow could not wean ourselves away from doing robust physical comedy, in the spirit of Bugs, Daffy, Wile E., and the Roadrunner, a style that the PTA ladies who hired us increasingly worried was setting a bad example for the children. A more gentle approach, a more dare-I-say Disney approach, was becoming à la mode.
Fast forward to 2015–2020 and the NYC Physical Comedy Lab. I had commissioned Adam Strauss, the genius at Theatrical Contrivances, to build us an assortment of trick doors based on videos I had seen of early vaudeville —footage shot by the Edison Studios in the 1890s! But I had always loved the image of Wile E. and other cartoon characters running through solid walls and leaving just their outline. Might it somehow be possible in live performance for a character to do the same? So I had Adam build one more door, and we sortakinda succeeded! Here’s Mik Kuhlman entering the cartoon world. Yes, I know the cutout is of the coyote and Mik is not a coyote, but you’ll get the point.
This could be made smoother, but before that we would have had to figure out how to make the door less likely to lose parts every time someone slammed through it.
Fast forward again, this time to the construction of our clown & circus rehearsal studio in Greenwood Lake, NY (2020–2022). When it came time to build the back door to the studio, Fred Yockers (now my construction partner) and I decided to use this same Wile E. Coyote image, tracing Wile E.’s outline from the actual trick door. It got its laughs, but then we came up with the topper, which was to attach the Wile E. body cutout to a tree perfectly located 10′ beyond the door. But the studio still did not have a name until Michael Zerphy, another former clown partner who had become a construction partner, suggested Falling Coyote Studios. By a happy coincidence, our address is 11 Cliff Road, so it was perfect.
2. Gary Gulman on Directing Wile E. Coyote
Gary Gulman is a very original and funny stand-up comedian, and this is a good example. Here he imagines what it would have been like to direct Wile E. when filming a cartoon. Just go along with the premise…
3. Road Runner by Michael Trautman
I have known Michael since at least 1985. He is a very funny and skilled performer and teacher with strong mime training, and here it proves a perfect match for the cartoon world.
And finally my opinion, for what it’s worth…
Given all of the above, I really wanted to like it, and I wasn’t convinced from the trailers that I would. So I was very relieved that I very much did. I might write more about it when I see it a second time, preferably not at the drive-in, but for now I’ll just say that it’s quite well done: creative and clever and funny, with a real mixture of visual and verbal humor, and with all sorts of cartoon
history and political digs layered in. It is very heavy on the action, which I always think is too much, but that’s me. What’s more important is that it’s getting a great reaction from the public and the critics, actually breaking popularity records on Rotten Tomatoes! I sure do love the fact that Ketchup Entertainment stands to make a good profit out of all this and that the artists involved finally get their due acclaim, especially Ian Frazier, who I’m sure never imagined the saga that his short piece would inspire over the next 36 years!
The original Ian Frazier humor piece
The New Yorker review
The New York Times review
Vulture review
And as a postscript, a poster entitled “The ACME Corporation,” designed by Chicago artist Rob Loukotka (founder of the studio Fringe Focus / Chartsman). It features 126 illustrated products ordered by Wile E. Coyote from the classic Road Runner cartoons.
