Sooner or later in any Road Runner cartoon, Wile E. Coyote falls off a cliff. Here’s an example. WARNING: There IS sound!
Now, in my memories of watching these cartoons in the 60s on Saturday morning broadcast tv, I remember the sound of the Coyote hitting the ground occurring a beat after the donut of dust appears. Which I thought was a pretty neat way to emphasize how far he had fallen. And educational too: light travels faster than sound.
Yet, in the clip I linked to in this post, and in all RR cartoons in my 4 DVD boxed sets of Looney Toons ( I have 5 different collections. So sue me. ) The sound occurs at the same time as the dust donut.
So, either I’m misremembering the sound delay or someone at Warner Brothers thought it was a mistake when they were prepping the old films for VHS and/or DVD transfer and “corrected” it.
The sound is all wrong. The coyote, for instance, never made a sound; now you hear little giggly sounds. Also, the sound of the boom in the Chuck Jones cartoons was always faint and muffled; this sounds like a gunshot.
Was this example directed by Jones? I suspect it wasn’t.
The delay in the original was small and very subtle, though – a fraction of a second.
IIRC, in this one he always made those grunts. I think he’s just spent hours climbing back up the cliff he fell off, is relieved that he made it…and then along comes the RR.
AHA!! Then it’s not just me! Someone else remembers the sound was delayed! Yes, it wasn’t as long as a second, but it was long enough for one to notice.
I don’t remember a delay in the sound of the impact, but I do remember as he fell he shrank to a dot, then the dot disappeared, then a short delay before the poof. But it’s been ages since I watched a Road Runner cartoon.
That was the genius of the falling animation, that the dot disappeared before the landing. It really emphasized just how darn far he had fallen.
As to the sound delay, there is a example in the game “Riven” when the player can close the floor of a structure from high above it. The clunk of the floor sections coming together is heard just a fraction of a second after you see them stop moving. I always thought this was great because it is one of those things that they didn’t have to do, but that would be appreciated by some players.
There is a lot of lore about the Roadrunner ‘thud’. One of the stories is that the delay was an audio mistake to start with, sounded better than the synchronized sound and became the standard. In another story it is claimed that the delay was intended, and the audio had to be re-recorded several times before the sound guys would put in the delay because they were so keen on keeping the sound synchronized. For broadcast replay the cartoons have been edited to make them seem less violent and some of the splats and thuds have been removed audibly, or completed edited out. It’s animated fig-leafing.
Sure. About the third time in a cartoon when some intricate plan to catch the Road Runner blew up in his face (and sometimes literally), one had to begin to feel sorry for the poor canine. And by now just starting to watch a toon, you go in admiring his ingenuity and persistence and can’t help hoping that he’d finally catch the damned bird.
Remember, in What’s Opera, Doc? Elmer did, in fact, kill the wabbit.
