Fast and Furry-ous (1949)

Best movie ever!

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

The first Road Runner and Coyote cartoon ever made (and their only one made in the 1940s). It's directed by Chuck Jones with a story by Michael Maltese. This team would be responsible for most of the great Road Runner and Coyote shorts. This first one sets the template for the rest of the series. The concept was always the same in that Wile E. Coyote tries various devices and traps to catch the Road Runner but constantly fails, typically in hilarious fashion. Here we have the basics already on display: boomerangs, dynamite, a roadblock, disguises and costumes, rockets and jets, running off a cliff, and classic ACME gadgetry. Chuck Jones would use a variation of every gag in this first short over and over throughout the series. The animation is beautiful with great colors and well-drawn backgrounds. The Road Runner and Coyote look slightly different than they would look later, but that's true of pretty much all the Looney Tunes characters in their first appearances. It's a fun, fast-paced short that begins one of the best and most consistently creative and funny series in the Looney Tunes library. It's one every fan should see at least once. A classic by every definition.

Fast and Furry-ous (1949)*** 1/2 (out of 4) The first ever Coyote and Road Runner film turns out to be a very enjoyable one. As would become the norm, the Coyote is hungry and wanting to eat the Road Runner but he's simply not fast (or smart) enough to catch him. This first short has plenty of wonderful laughs as the violent action is constantly finding hilarious ways to injure the Coyote. One of my favorite gags in the film is when the Coyote pants the side of a mountain to appear like a road so that the Road Runner will kill himself by running into it but things don't work out as planned. Another funny jokes includes the Coyote making a ski machine to build up speed but of course this doesn't go as planned either. Director Jones was a fan of silent movies and that's easy to see with these shorts.

So this is where it all started. From here on, Wile E. Coyote (cue scientific name implying gluttony) would come up with an infinite number of ways to get the Road Runner (cue scientific name implying speed), but would always end up maiming himself. OK, so maybe it gets a little repetitive to always have him do this, but how can you not like it? "Fast and Furry-ous" is everything that one can expect in one of these cartoons. If nothing else, they remind us that the more you try to harm others, the more you get harmed. And they have a great way of showing it. These guys are the original road warriors. Definitely a cartoon classic.

Some people love Bugs Bunny. Some people love Daffy Duck. Some Porky Pig and others Pepe LePew (I NEVER understood the love for the last one), I'm not saying those are not great characters, as they ARE (well accept Pepe), but give me a Wile E. Coyote/ Roadrunner short to watch and I'm on cloud 9. This very first ever amazing pairing of the two is nothing short of greatness. The gags are all rapid-fire and they all work. I was laughing throughout the whole short. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!! This insanely great cartoon is on Disk 3 of the "Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 1" It also has an optional commentary as well as a featuretteMy Grade: A+