Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner have been frequently referenced in popular culture. The Villain (directed by Hal Needham) is a parody of these animated shorts as well as being a spoof of westerns. In The Drawn Together Movie: The Movie!, Road Runner gets run down and dies, after which Coyote commits suicide by shooting himself in the head with a prop gun.

In a sketch on In Living Color (Season 5, Episode 10), Wile E. Coyote (played by Jamie Foxx) is put on trial by Congress for displaying excessive violence in his cartoons; Elmer Fudd (played by Jay Leggett) is his lawyer. In the film UHF, "Weird Al" Yankovic's character introduces a Road Runner cartoon as a sad, depressing story of a "pathetic coyote" futilely chasing a "sadistic roadrunner". The characters were referenced in The Simpsons, The Cleveland Show, Bounty Hamster, Kick Buttowski, What's New, Scooby-Doo?, Robot Chicken, and South Park.

In an episode of Cheers, some bar patrons discuss the Road Runner cartoons. The discussion continues and builds in intensity as a minor subplot throughout the entire episode until at the end of the show some of the bar patrons are boisterously declaring that the Coyote character is meant to be symbolic of the Antichrist. Wile E. Coyote appeared briefly in an episode of the live-action show Night Court, where he was admonished by Judge Harry Stone for chasing a bird. Wile E. Coyote has appeared two times in Family Guy (voiced by Seth MacFarlane): his first episode, I Never Met the Dead Man, depicts him riding in a car with Peter Griffin; when Peter runs over the Road Runner and asks if he hit "that ostritch", Wile E. tells him to keep going. In PTV, Wile E. appears in a flashback when Peter, working at Acme, offers a store credit when Wile E. claims a refund for a giant sling shot that "slammed me into a mountain". In the Dexter's Laboratory episode "Road Rash" Dee-Dee does an impression of the Road Runner after Dexter falls down a man hole.

101 Dalmatians: The Series included a parody of the cartoons in the episode The Making Of..., where Cruella De Vil takes the coyote's role, and Spot the Roadrunner's. The characters appeared in the MAD episode "Not-a-Fan-a-Montana", where Miley Cyrus was Wile E. and Justin Bieber was Road Runner. Then in the segment "Meep! My Dad Says" (a parody of $h*! My Dad Says), where the Road Runner appears as the main character to be a father. In the episode "Rio-A", Road Runner gets a ring in his lunch and acquires the ability to fly, while Wile E. gets hit by an anvil.

Guitarist Mark Knopfler created a song called "Coyote" in homage to the cartoon shows of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, on the 2002 album The Ragpicker's Dream. Humorist Ian Frazier created the mock-legal prose piece "Coyote v. Acme", which is included in a book of the same name. Karen Salmansohn wrote an article on The Huffington Post centering on the characters.

Whenever the professional wrestling organization WWE puts on a ladder match, it has an overhead camera positioned above the ring in order to get footage of wrestlers as they fall off the ladder, this has led to WWE hall of fame wrestler and commentator Jerry "The King" Lawler to refer to it as the "Wile E. Coyote Cam".

During the 2012 Stanley Cup Playoffs, Wile E. Coyote appeared on the hockey helmet of one of the goalies from the Phoenix Coyotes. Before the arrival of the Coyotes in 1996, several iterations of minor league hockey teams named the Phoenix Roadrunners played in the area, though none of them used Warner Bros. imagery of the characters in mascot designs.

In a commercial for GEICO, the GEICO Gecko was exploring the desert when he noticed the Road Runner run by him. Wile E. Coyote, chasing the Road Runner, stops to notice the Gecko as he plans to eat him instead, but from out of nowhere, a safe falls on the coyote.

South Korean boy band NU'EST mentions Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner in their debut song Face.