The Roadrunner Show
Each episode of the 30-minute-long Road Runner Show that aired on CBS from September 10, 1966 to September 7, 1968, started with a Road Runner cartoon, many of which, directed by Rudy Larriva or by Robert McKimson, had been completed and distributed to theatres just months earlier! The second cartoon in each show featured Tweety and Sylvester, and third and last was a cartoon with one or some of the following: Sylvester, Sylvester Jr., Hippety Hopper, Speedy Gonzales, Ralph Wolf, Sam Sheepdog, Pepe Le Pew, Foghorn Leghorn, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny- and titled with a group of five characters (Foghorn, Pepe, Speedy, Sam, Fudd) arranged in a semi-circle.
Episodes of The Road Runner Show were opened and closed with a groovy song written by Barbara Cameron and performed by a vocal group, with difficult-to-understand lyrics rather like those on the classic Spiderman series (1967-70). This was the same song that would be played after "This is It" on The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour. With the song, quick cuts from various Road Runner cartoons were shown. Some of the cartoons from which the cuts were taken were "Run, Run, Sweet Road Runner" (Wile E. fluttering his eyebrows at the camera), "Tired and Feathered" (Wile E. shaking his head to mean "no" and the Road Runner releasing a lever to send Wile E. barreling down a hill on a stone log which crushes him against the rock formation at the base of the hill), "Highway Runnery" (Wile E.'s fan losing power just as he is about to clear a gorge on his wind sail), "Hip- Hip- Hurry!" (Wile E. trying to sling-shot a dynamite stick, only to have it explode in his face), and "Wild About Hurry" (Wile E.'s rocket colliding with a rock). The text to this song can be found on the Road Runner Info page
Brief sequences with the Road Runner and Wile E., animated specially for The Road Runner Show, were inserted
between cartoons one and two and between cartoons two and three of each episode. In these sequences, Wile E. uses grenades with a tennis racket, a cannon, a red-nosed, wheeled robot, a rifle tied to a string, a rocket with an unreliable fuse, a Road Runner replica costume, a jet-powered car, a sketch of himself and of the Road Runner on an easel, a boulder dropped from a cliff above a water cooler, dynamite under two manhole covers, a telephone connected by a fuse to a huge TNT stick, a remote-controlled rocket that launches then descends explosively upon him, and a motorcycle that takes him up a hill to arrive on the underside of a precipice, from which he falls, demolishing the motorcycle.
The Road Runner Show was superseded on CBS by The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour on September 14, 1968. Starting in September, 1971, The Road Runner Show was rerun on ABC
in a reassembled form, with some trimming to remove Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf smoking in "A Sheep in the Deep", the sound of Sylvester slapping his own face in "Snow Business", Foghorn Leghorn's quip about his cupboard being, "Bare as a cooch dancer's midriff," in "Strangled Eggs", and some of the consequences of Wile E. Coyote's failing schemes in the between-cartoon sequences.
CBS' first episode of The Road Runner Show on Sept. 10, 1966 contained "Zip N' Snort", "Hyde and Go Tweet", and "The Wild Chase"
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