“No dialogue ever, except “Beep-Beep!”

I took this photo at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York, eleven years ago. This was just before being told by a docent that photography was not allowed in the exhibit space (sorry!). The exhibition was titled, “What’s Up, Doc? The Animation Art of Chuck Jones.”

Jason Kottke also posted “The Rules of Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote Cartoons” around the same time, in 2012 (a vintage post). The two versions are pretty close!

As Chuck Jones says in Chuck Amuck, “The rules and disciplines are properly difficult to identity. But there are – there must be – rules. Without them, comedy slops over the edges. Identity is lost.” (1)

This reminds me of Claude Shannon’s notion: “The rules of a game provide a sharply limited environment in which a machine may operate, with a clearly defined dial for its activities."(2)

When thinking of AI, it seems there are no rules at the moment. The game is being played while the rules are being made.

Road Runner Rules -- Museum of the Moving Image, NY

(1) Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York: 1989), p. 224.

(2) C. E. Shannon, "Computers and Automata," in Proceedings of the IRE (Vol. 41, No. 10, Oct. 1953), p. 1237.