‘You’ll Never Catch Him!’

Paul Julian just wanted everyone to get out of the way. Maneuvering down the narrow hallways on the Warner Brothers studio lot while carrying a very long, freshly painted background, the artist (who had worked as a WPA muralist before his animation gig) would emit a car horn–esque “beep-beep” to warn his colleagues of his approach. The Looney Tunes impresario Chuck Jones heard Julian and convinced him to come to the Warner recording studio, where his urgent beeps (Julian always insisted that the spelling ought to be “hmeep-hmeep”) were put on tape. These recordings, sped up, debuted in 1949’s Fast and Furry-ous, the very first Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon, and have been employed as the Road Runner’s vocalization ever since. The ad hoc recording of a now inescapable sound (you’re hearing it in your head right now, aren’t you?) was not remarkable in the moment. Michael Maltese, the writer of Fast and Furry-ous, said in an interview long after its release, “It was just another one-shot, just another workaday cartoon.” Now, though, in the words of the animation historian Michael Barrier, the Coyote and Road Runner shorts “could be considered the Warner cartoons at their pures...