ANTE COYOTE

The savagely funny Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote animated chase shorts produced by Warner Brothers’ Studios in the 1950’s and 60’s are commonly regarded by both the casual viewer and the professional as the apotheosis of the animated cartoon art form. Beautifully drawn, wonderfully syncopated and utterly bereft of social value, they seem to represent as it were art for its own sake, the kind of pure expression of will and vision that marks the greatest of esthetic achievements.
Which makes it all the more surprising and interesting to discover that these films, accepted as the ultimate in cartoon mayhem qua cartoon mayhem, were inspired by the work of living performers roaming the Central and South American vaudeville circuits during the early part of the 20th century. In fact, the stories performed by these actors that inspired the Roadrunner films were not simply slapstick free-for-alls but political theater, sophisticated Marxist and nationalist diatribes designed to educate and inflame an illiterate peasantry against the evils of capitalist colonial rule. These early live action performances were largely the work of one man, the Mexican dancer and sculptor Ignazio Torres, who conceived and executed the traveling show, titled “Loco! Loco! Loco!”, as a means of fomenting world wide Bolshevist revolution.

Torres was executed for seditious activity in Bolivia in 1921, and his contribution to the Roadrunner films would be all but forgotten except for the intervention of a maternal great-great grandchild, the contemporary Chilean artist and performer Kris Lee, who unearthed the sets and costumes for the Loco! Loco! Loco! shows in 1989 in a barn on the family compound outside Santiago.
The sets consist largely of some 30 five foot by ten foot landscape canvases used as backdrops against which the performers cavorted. The images bear a striking resemblance to the famous south western “red rock” backdrops of the Roadrunner and Coyote films, right down the deep canyons into which Wile E. Coyote inevitably falls, and the looping, dipping roads into a deeply recessed plain along which the Roadrunner just as inevitably disappears into a cloud of dust. The actors who performed in front of these sets were not humans, but animals. The protagonist was a highly trained Chihuahua named Nico, who, wearing a little red white and blue top hat and frock coat in the style of Thomas Nast’s famous “Uncle Sam” creation, would chase small canaries (all invariably named “Little Pepe”) in tiny ponchos and sombreros across one vista after another utilizing a variety of now-familiar Rube Goldbergesque tools; springs, levers , primitive “rocket” cars, slingshots, etc. Unlike the cartoons, which always end with the escape of the bird and the “punishment” of the coyote, Torres would often allow the dog, for pedagogical purposes, to catch and eat the birds, tethered to thin strings, at the end of the performances. Afterwards Torres himself would frequently stride onto the stage to provide a lengthy and highly charged explanation of the proceeding action so as to insure that his largely apolitical audiences got the subversive drift of the political theater. “We are all canaries!” he would cry, waving a pistol in the air, “If we do not stand and fight, we will be eaten by the dogs of the north!”. Just how effective Torres’ work was one can judge for oneself by the events of the subsequent 100 years, but there is no doubt that he provided constantly satisfying entertainment. Scrapbooks also discovered in the barn by Lee testify to the overwhelming popularity of the Loco! Loco! Loco! shows. Celebrities from both north and south of the border attended the performances;

a guest book bears the signatures of historical characters as diverse as Pancho Villa, Charlie Chaplin, Diego Rivera and Freida Kahlo, Jack Warner and, astonishingly, the President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt, who saw the show in Panama while inspecting of the progress of the famous canal dig. (Roosevelt’s enigmatic comment was, “Bully for the plucky chicken!”) Another spectator, we can only assume, was the youthful Chuck Jones, the brilliant animator who later “invented” Roadrunner and Coyote for Warner Brothers. Jones was born in 1912 and grew up in Hollywood, where he worked as a child extra in silent comedies. His family frequently vacationed in the resort towns of Baja, Mexico, many of which maintained theaters for tourists that were heavily trafficked by itinerant South American vaudeville troupes. Torres brought his act into Baja every spring. It is not difficult to image the youthful Jones taking in Loco! Loco! Loco! shows at the shore between the years 1918, when he was six, and 1921, when he was nine. (Torres execution in Bolivia took place in December of that year).
In fact, Jones connection to the Loco! Loco! Loco! routines may well be even closer than that of mere onlooker. The one extant film of the Loco! Loco! Loco! show was made in Burbank California in 1920, where Jones lived and where he frequently found work as a child actor in Max Sennett’s Keystone Kop films. In the film, titled “Little Pepe Fights Back” Nico the dog chases the canary Pepe through a ramshackle desert town utilizing several of his favorite props, including a pair of spring powered shoes and a miniature scooter. The canary is tied to a string held by a small child whose face is all but obscured by an enormous comic lampblack mustache. At the end of the film, as the dog chews on a mouthful of feathers we can only assume are Pepe’s mortal remains, the mournful child turns to the camera and raises his right fist in a salute of revolutionary solidarity.
The urgency of an inserted story board with the words “Workers of the World, Unite” is undermined by the twinkle in the child’s eye and the words he clearly mouths to the camera; “Meep! Meep!”
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