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Mark Twain helped inspire Wile E. Coyote
Or, how a book from 1872 inspired a 1949 cartoon!
Have you ever wondered who or what inspired your favorite Looney Tunes characters? For most of us, the Looney Tunes have become a beloved pillar of American culture, making us laugh at their antics and adventures, and their characters have seemingly always existed on our TVs. Most Looney Tunes characters don't have a direct inspiration source; for example, Bugs Bunny was partially inspired by Clark Gable's character in It Happened One Night, but as the character developed, he was also clearly inspired by Groucho Marx, Jack Benny, and other entertainers. Most Looney Tunes characters had multiple sources of inspiration, but ultimately, each developed into its own unique character.
Other Looney Tunes characters were mashups of different sources of inspiration, but Chuck Jones revealed that Wile E. Coyote had specifically been inspired by the works of Mark Twain. Jones was a lifelong fan of Twain, quoting from many of Twain's books in his own.
Jones first mentioned his love of Mark Twain in Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist, even sketching the famed author in the book and describing Twain as his "dearest friend" despite the two men never meeting. "I first became interested in the Coyote while devouring Mark Twain's Roughing It at the age of seven," Jones wrote, "The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton, with a gray wolf-skin stretched over it, a tolerably bushy tail that forever sags down with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery...He has a general slinking expression all over."
Visually, that sounds almost exactly like Wile E. Coyote, but Jones felt the coyote's character on a deeper level, writing, "The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless...even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede." These character traits would later make it into Jones' laws of the Coyote-Road Runner series, further shaping Wile E. Coyote as a stand-out Looney Tunes character.
As a child, Jones felt he had much in common with Twain's coyote, writing, "I cannot begin to express the relief I felt at finding a companion to my own unique ineptness. It was so reassuring to find someone else of my own age,"
In his second book, Chuck Reducks: Drawing from the Fun Side of Life, Jones expanded on Twain's impact on the Coyote/Road Runner dynamic, "In Roughing It, Mark Twain described a dog taking off after a coyote. This was a city dog, with a pretty good opinion of his speed. He is only a snap behind the coyote, but he cannot gain, however hard he tries, which bothers him...There is a zip and a sort of crack in the atmosphere, and the dog realizes he is alone. He begins to understand something about speed, limps back to the wagon train, and crawls under a wagon."
The dog is humiliated by defeat, which brings to mind two of the Coyote/Road Runner rules: Rule 3, The Coyote could stop anytime if he were not a fanatic, and Rule 9, The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
Not only did Twain inspire Wile E. Coyote, but he also inspired part of the Road Runner's antics, as Jones wrote, "In the next chapter of Roughing It, Twain describes the jackrabbit. When he takes off, he just vanishes, leaving a trail of smoke as he disappears in the direction of San Francisco. This passage gave me the idea of pure speed and inspired the action of the Road Runner."
