For thirteen years MGM had the great Tex Avery; after 1940 they also had Hanna and Barbera putting Tom and Jerry through their formulaic wars. Those differ from the Coyote-Road Runner quest in that whereas Wile E. and his quarry exist in different psychic universes — the one obsessed, the other blithe — the Tom-and-Jerry formula calls simply for a cat who’d eat a mouse if only he could manage to catch it; but the mouse, being smaller, hence smarter, can always outmaneuver him. The Road Runner never outmaneuvers the Coyote. He’s never even distressed by him. what outdoes the Coyote is the interactiveness of a single coherent universe, where fanaticism is guaranteed to defeat itself.