This Exhibit Shows How Animator Chuck Jones Made Looney Tunes Great By Mixing Groucho Marx and Mark Twain

“The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton,” wrote Mark Twain in Roughing It.  “He has a general slinking expression all over. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless.” Twain could have been describing the comically scrawny predator in the Looney Tunes Road Runner series – and he was. Road Runner creator Chuck Jones based Wile E. Coyote’s character on Twain’s 1872 description of wildlife in the Wild West (though the raggedness of Wile E.’s tail derived from ukiyo-e woodblock prints of cresting waves).