Acme Corporation

This article is about the fictional Looney Tunes company. For other uses, see Acme.
An example of an Acme product from a Road Runner cartoon

The Acme Corporation is a fictional corporation that features prominently in the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons as a running gag featuring outlandish products that fail or backfire catastrophically at the worst possible times. The name is also used as a generic title in many cartoons, films, TV series and comic strips. It is used also as an organizations's placeholder name.

The company name in the Road Runner cartoons is ironic, since the word acme is derived from Greek (ακμή; English transliteration: akmē) meaning the peak, zenith or prime, and products from the fictional Acme Corporation are both generic and failure-prone.

Origin

A real-world advertisement for ACME anvils

The name Acme became popular for businesses by the 1920s, when alphabetized business telephone directories such as the Yellow Pages began to be widespread. There was a flood of businesses named Acme, including Acme Brick, Acme Markets, and Acme Boots. Early Sears catalogues even contained a number of products with the "Acme" trademark, including anvils, which are frequently used in Warner Bros. cartoons.[1]

Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones has said the name Acme was chosen because of its prevalence:

Since we had to search out our own entertainment, we devised our own fairy stories. If you wanted a bow and arrow you got a stick. If you wanted to conduct an orchestra you got a stick. If you wanted a duel you used a stick. You couldn't go and buy one; that's where the terms acme came from. Whenever we played a game where we had a grocery store or something we called it the ACME corporation. Why? Because in the yellow pages if you looked, say, under drugstores, you'd find the first one would be Acme Drugs. Why? Because "AC" was about as high as you could go; it means the best; the superlative.
— Chuck Jones in a 2009 documentary[2]

The name Acme also had other connotations for people in Los Angeles at the time. Cartoon animation is drawn on paper and cels which have holes punched in them for registration. There were two standards: Acme and Oxberry. Oxberry was an American company started by John Oxberry in New Rochelle, New York, that produced a wide array of motion picture and special effects equipment, and was seen on the American east coast while Acme was dominant on the west coast during the early years of animation production. The Acme film equipment company in California not only made the hole punches but the animation stands used by all the west coast animation studios, as well as lights, some cameras and other film gear. Animators working at Warner Brothers used Acme punched paper shot on Acme animation stands drawn on Acme disks (light tables), so that having products come from Acme in cartoons was an inside joke that any animator would recognize.

The traffic lights in Los Angeles during the time the Warner Bros. cartoons were being made were manufactured by the Acme Traffic Signal Company. The traffic lights paired “Stop” and “Go” semaphore arms with small red and green lights. Bells played the role of today’s amber or yellow lights, ringing when the flags changed—a process that took five seconds.[3] The Acme semaphore traffic lights were often used in Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons for comedic effect due to their loud bell which was often followed by screeching tires and many sight gags.

It is a common misconception that Acme is an acronym standing for such things as "A Company that Makes Everything", "American Companies Make Everything" or "American Company that Manufactures Everything".[4]

Fictional depiction

Before Road Runner, an "Acme Company" which controls the production and sale of the fictional element "tungite" appears in the 1940 serial Mysterious Doctor Satan.

In Road Runner

The company is never clearly defined in Road Runner cartoons but appears to be a conglomerate which produces every product type imaginable, no matter how elaborate or extravagant – most of which never work as desired or expected. In the Road Runner cartoon Beep, Beep, it was referred to as "Acme Rocket-Powered Products, Inc." based in Fairfield, New Jersey. Many of its products appear to be produced specifically for Wile E. Coyote; for example, the Acme Giant Rubber Band, subtitled "(For Tripping Road Runners)".

Sometimes, Acme can also send living creatures through the mail, though that isn't done very often. Two examples of this are the Acme Wild-Cat, which had been used on Elmer Fudd and Sam Sheepdog (which doesn't maul its intended victim, but the owner instead); and Acme Bumblebees in one-fifth bottles (which sting Wile E. Coyote). The Wild Cat was used in the shorts Don't Give Up the Sheep and A Mutt in a Rut, while the bees were used in the short Zoom and Bored.

While their products leave much to be desired, Acme delivery service is second to none; Wile E. can merely drop an order into a mailbox (or enter an order on a website, as in the Looney Tunes: Back in Action movie), and have the product in his hands within seconds.

Appearances

A mural of Wile E. Coyote smashed into an ACME Instant Tunnel on the wall of the Rotch Library at MIT

The name "Acme" is used as a generic corporate name in a huge number of cartoons, comics, television shows (as early as an I Love Lucy episode), and film (as early as Buster Keaton's 1920 silent film Neighbors and Harold Lloyd's 1922 film Grandma's Boy).

Examples which specifically reference the Wile E. Coyote cartoon character include:

Animated films, TV series

Music

Legal humor

Other

See also

References

  1. ↑ E.O. Costello. "ACME". The Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion.
  2. ↑ Peggy Stern and John Canemaker (filmmakers) (March 24, 2009). Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood (Documentary). Turner Classic Movies and Warner Bros. Event occurs at 12 min. Retrieved April 29, 2009.
  3. ↑ CityDig: Should I Stop or Should I Go? Early Traffic Signals in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Magazine. Retrieved 2015-01-01.
  4. ↑ "What does ACME stand for?". AcronymFinder.
  5. ↑ Catálogo Cogumelo 30 anos. Cogumelo Records. 2012. p. 83.
  6. ↑ Gordon III, James E., "A Bibliography of Humor and the Law", 1992 BYU Law Review No.2 427 at 451, retrieved August 15, 2013 from http://www.law2.byu.edu/lawreview4/archives/1992/2/gordo.pdf
  7. ↑ Wile E. Coyote, Plaintiff. vs. Acme Company, Defendant IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT, SOUTHWESTERN DISTRICT, TEMPE, ARIZONA CASE NO. B19294, JUDGE JOAN KUJAVA, PRESIDING Frazier, Ian, The New Yorker, February 26, 1990, p. 42-44 Satire. Archived June 19, 2014, at the Wayback Machine.
  8. ↑ "Journal of acme (189)". use Perl;. May 23, 2001. Archived from the original on May 11, 2011.

External links

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