On 17 September 1949, Chuck Jones and WB released a seven-minute Technicolor short (Britannica). Michael Maltese wrote it. Carl Stalling scored it. A coyote chased a road runner across the American southwest, failed 11 times, and created a format that has not stopped running since.

The title is a pun on “fast and furious”, a phrase that was already old in 1949, and one that would not become a film franchise for another half century. Chuck Jones got there first by 52 years.

That is 77 years to the day. There is more on the short itself at the bottom of this page. First, what happens next.

Coyote and Road Runner are back on screen because of you

77 years on, the Coyote finally got a hearing. In Coyote vs. Acme, in cinemas now, he sues the company that sold him every one of those products and hires a struggling lawyer to argue it. Will Forte plays the lawyer.

It nearly did not exist. Warner Bros. finished the film and then shelved it in November 2023 (Variety). The backlash was loud enough that the film was sold on instead.

It has since taken more than $82 million worldwide (Cartoon Brew). Legion M was part of the team that helped make that happen.

A film that exists because fans refused to let it go

Studios shelve finished films. It happens quietly and it usually stays quiet. This one did not. Animators, critics, and a very loud audience spent months refusing to accept that a completed Looney Tunes feature would never be seen, and the pressure worked. The film was sold on rather than buried. Ketchup Entertainment completed the purchase in March 2025 (Cartoon Brew) and put it in cinemas on 28 August.

Legion M is proud to bring interesting partners into our community, and this has been one of the most exciting to date.

Three parties, one chain

And on his 114th birthday, we released the collection

Three moments inside of one week. The 77th anniversary of the short. The film in theaters. And then, on 21 September, Chuck Jones's 114th birthday.

We did not let that pass quietly. On his birthday we released a full line made with the Chuck Jones Gallery, produced for this community and nowhere else. Everything in it traces back to the seven minutes at the top of this page.

The first one sold out in hours

Ben Olson's first piece for Legion M was The Fine Art of Disregard. The Coyote standing in a field of the exact ACME products that have failed him, holding a warning label. Every signed and numbered print sold out a few hours after we released them.

The companion piece goes the other way. Nothing to Chase But Stars puts the two of them on a mesa, side by side, looking up. No anvil, no rocket, no chase. After 77 years, Ben gave the chase a night off. That edition sold out by noon on the birthday.

And today, the third

Fanaticus Foreverus is the Coyote at his drawing table, mid-plan, surrounded by every idea that has ever failed him. The lamp says Just Keep Trying. The Road Runner is sitting on the shelf right behind him, and he has not noticed.

Chuck Jones gave the chase a mock Latin name in almost every short. This one is for the Coyote himself. On the wall behind him is George Santayana's definition of a fanatic, a line Chuck kept because it described his Coyote better than anything he could have written.

Ben filled this one with references. The books, the labels, the pencils, the shelf. Most of them you will not catch on the first look, and that is the idea. We will publish the full list later.

There are 449 of these, and that is because of you. The last one was gone in two hours, and what we heard afterwards was mostly from people who wanted one and missed it. So Ben and the gallery agreed to open this edition up. If you hold one of the first two, those editions are closed and they stay the rarest things we have made.

Buy Fanaticus Foreverus

Every object in The Fine Art of Disregard appears in the 1949 short.

• The rocket

  1949

• The boomerang

  1949

• The paint

  1949

• The meat grinder

  1949

• One pair of shoes, crated

  1949

An all new four card commemorative set

Series 1 is a special edition of four. Five by seven, heavy stock, the Legion M mark on every one. We made this exclusively for the Legion M community.

All four cards are out, and The Fine Art of Disregard is card one.

The man behind the artwork

Chuck Jones made the characters, and now Ben Olson has picked up the pen to bring them to life for us, under license from the Chuck Jones Gallery for this collection. Every piece of artwork in it came from his mind.

He is a contemporary artist and animation director based in Central Florida, and a licensed Disney, Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera fine artist. His work is built on bold color, kinetic movement and a deliberate streak of nostalgia, and it sits in the space between fine art and animation rather than fully in either.

He is also a board member of the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity, the organization Jones founded.

He directed a tribute to the 1949 short, for J.J. Abrams

Olson's directorial debut was an animated short made with Bad Robot and Warner Bros. for the Max series Duster. The short is a tribute to “Fast and Furry-ous”, the same seven minutes this article is about. Working directly with Abrams and the Bad Robot team was, in his words, a dream collaboration and a career highlight.

He has already made his own answer to the 1949 short, on screen, with the studio that released it.

He has been doing this since he was five

That is when he picked up his first art supplies, and he has not stopped since. Before the galleries there was commercial work for Verizon, Mattel, the State of Illinois and Simon Malls. Deeply influenced by Jones, he found a fitting home with the Chuck Jones Gallery.

He refuses to be pinned to one style or medium. Picasso, Peter Max and Monet all turn up in how he talks about the work, filtered into something modern built on harmony, movement and color. His audience has grown well past the United States, with collectors across Asia and Europe, and his current project, The Journey, runs across fine art, merchandise and an animated series still to come.

And he drew for four days straight at our booth

He was at our San Diego Comic-Con booth signing prints of The Fine Art of Disregard, and he drew made-to-order characters on the back of them, freehand, in pen, with no pencil underneath. He made something for everyone who stood in that line, then did it again at the gallery. He signs every print in these editions by hand, one at a time. There is no autopen and there is no stamp.

One more thing before you go

11 ways to fail in seven minutes

The first short runs through 11 or 12 attempts, depending on how you count. Five of them:

• Knife
• Boomerang
• Bomb
• Rocket
• Paint on a rock face

That last one is the gag everyone remembers. The Coyote paints a tunnel on a cliff, the Road Runner runs straight through it as though it were real, and the Coyote, following, hits solid rock.

The signs are the tell. The Coyote reads, plans and engineers. The Road Runner does not read and does not need to.

At the end he hears a “beep beep” and swings an axe at it. It is a bus. The Road Runner is in the back seat, and he closes the curtain.

Watch the 1949 short

The classic Looney Tunes library left HBO Max in March 2025 and now streams free on Tubi, nearly 800 shorts in all (Cartoon Brew). Fast and Furry-ous is the third short in that episode, about 15 minutes in.

Six things almost nobody knows about that first short

1. Wile E. Coyote came out of a Mark Twain book

   In Roughing It, published in 1872, Twain describes a coyote as “a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton” and “a living, breathing allegory of want”.

   Jones read it at the age of seven and built a character out of it (Chuck Jones Enterprises).

2. He was almost named Don Coyote

   A pun on Don Quixote, which would have made the joke explicit rather than letting it sit underneath.

3. In 1949, not everything was ACME yet

   The running gag that every product comes from the same catastrophically unreliable company came later. In the first short the traps are simply traps.

4. It was built as a parody

   Of chase cartoons generally, and of the road-runner-versus-coyote setup that already existed in nature documentaries.

5. They have Latin names

   Carnivorous Vulgaris and Accelleratii Incredibus. Mock scientific names that appear on screen, a device Jones kept returning to for decades.

6. The Road Runner's voice is one man, recorded once

   Paul Julian, a background painter at the studio, made the “beep beep” sound walking down a corridor with his arms full. Jones brought him into the studio to record it (Chuck Jones Enterprises).

And the rules he wrote for himself

Jones set out a list of constraints for every Coyote and Road Runner cartoon, published years later in his memoir Chuck Amuck (Chuck Jones Enterprises). They read like a design document. Paraphrased:

1. The Road Runner never attacks

   His only weapon is the beep. Everything that happens to the Coyote, the Coyote does to himself.

2. Nothing outside can hurt the Coyote

   Only his own ineptitude, or an ACME product doing what ACME products do.

3. He could stop at any time

   He is not trapped, he is a fanatic, and that is the difference.

4. No dialogue

   The beep, and yowling. Nothing else. 77 years later the feature film still honours this.

5. Everything stays in the desert

   The American southwest, and the Road Runner stays on the road, because he is a road runner.

6. Every device comes from ACME

   One supplier, catastrophically unreliable, never held to account. Until this year.

7. Gravity is the real antagonist

   Whenever it can be, it is.

8. Humiliation over injury

   He is embarrassed far more than he is hurt, and the audience stays on his side throughout.

9. He never catches him

   That rule has held since 1949.

Rule three is the one that makes the rest work. He could stop at any point and never does. That is the line the third piece is named for.

The collection is on sale now

Released 17 September 1949. Technicolor, 7:07. Directed by Chuck Jones, written by Michael Maltese, scored by Carl Stalling. The Twain passage is from Roughing It, 1872. Box office figures as of 14 September 2026, as reported by Cartoon Brew. Looney Tunes and all related characters are trademarks of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Artwork produced under license by the Chuck Jones Gallery.