In the Coyote’s ever-present quest to catch the Road Runner, he resorts to hypnosis! Of course, the fail here is quite epic.
In one of the many segments of ‘Zipping Along’. Wile E Coyote is reading the book “Hypnotism Self-Taught” by Hershenberger, particularly the chapter ‘How to Induce a Person to Jump Off a Cliff’. Armed with his new knowledge, Wile E Coyote is able to hypnotize a fly into marching off a rock, with much stereotypical lightning and sound effects. Now, for the Road Runner. Except the Road Runner is for some reason carrying a hand mirror, and reflects the hypnotic lightning back into the Coyote’s eyes. Under his own spell, the Coyote marches off the nearest cliff.
Commentary: One has to wonder whether ACME was also a book publisher: the Coyote’s luck with the information from the book was about the same as with any of the mechanisms he got on order from ACME. And its also immediately obvious what went wrong for the Coyote: when he hypnotized the fly, he was using an underhand motion whereas when he tried to hypnotize the Road Runner, he was using an overhand motion; maybe he skipped that part of the book.
However, I have not been able to determine whether the book shown was an actual publication, or whether it was possibly a joke on someone in the studio by that name. Certainly the chapter title is fictional.
Reference:
- ‘Zipping Along’ at the IMDb
There were three rules in the Road Runner cartoons:
1) The Road Runner only runs on the road.
2) The road is always in the Desert Southwest.
3) All equiptment that Wile E. Coyote uses are from ACME Corp.
IIRC at the end of another RR cartoon the camera zooms in for a shot at the builder’s plate of an ACME catapult and we see that ACME is owned by the Road Runner!
BEEBEEP!