The Road Runner Show

The Road Runner Show
Premiere	September 10, 1966
Finale	March 2, 1967
Network/Provider	CBS (season 1-2) ABC (season 3)
Style	30 minute animated anthology
Company	Warner Bros. Television
Distributor	Warner Bros. Television
Seasons	3
Episodes	26
Origin	USA

The Road Runner Show is an animated anthology of Warner Bros. animated theatrical short subjects that aired on CBS. The series starred Chuck Jones' desert antagonists.

Jones created the Road Runner and Coyote to initially satirize the standard cartoon chase. Audiences took it as straight comedy, so that's how it would be made from that point on. The rules were concrete: The characters (in Jones' cartoons) would be identified with bogus scientific genuses, the characters never spoke (apart from the Road Runner's "Beep Beep" and a later 1962 cartoon pilot, The Adventures of the Road Runner. where the Coyote does a dissertation on why he wants to catch the Road Runner and how to catch him), the Coyote's gimmicks never work on the Road Runner (only on himself), and he gets everything from the Acme Corporation.

Selected cartoons were features along with theatrical cartoons starring other Warner stablemates. Many of these cartoons were previously seen on The Bugs Bunny Show on ABC. Added to the batch were the mid-1960s Road Runner cartoons made by the DePatie-Freleng and Format studios under the directorship of Robert McKimson and Rudy Larriva. Road Runner cartoons not shown on this program were syndicated as part of the Bugs Bunny and Friends package.

The show ran two seasons before being melded into The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour on CBS in 1968. Later, a 1971 version of The Road Runner Show appeared on ABC featuring some of the same shorts and bridging sequences as this version. In 1962, Warner Bros. released a 25-minute feature, The Adventures of the Road Runner, as a potential pilot. It featured all-new animation, some reused footage from previous cartoons and the 1954 Ralph Phillips short From A to Z-z-z-z. Portions of the feature would be edited for TV in 1965 as two separate shorts, Zip Zip Hooray and Road Runner A-Go-Go.

Western Publishing's Gold Key Comics arm would publish a Road Runner comic book from 1958 to 1984, giving him the name Beep Beep and three sons in tow. The Road Runners' dialogue would be exclusively in rhyme. Road Runner comics stories would be made in the late 1990s for DC Comics' Looney Tunes title, and the stories played it straight like the original cartoons.

Seasons

Season	Premiere	Finale				#
CBS
Season One	September 10, 1966	September 2, 1967				26
Season Two	September 9, 1967	September 7, 1968				—
ABC
Season Three	September 11, 1971	September 2, 1972				—

In-Depth

• At a Glance: Additional information about the series

DVD Releases

There are no DVD releases for this show.