Hook, Line and Stinker (1958)
Wile E. Coyote hopes to catch the Road Runner using a mallet, a cooking pan, a TNT stick, a balloon, and a piano dropped from a precipice. The last of these results in Wile E. falling to the road below along with the piano and ending up with 88 teeth.
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Simply Perfect
Great Film overall
Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.
Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
Lesser Chuck Jones Road Runner & Coyote short that's still better than all of the stuff that came after Jones left the series. The animation is solid, if not particularly exceptional. The colors are kind of dull, which is odd for the time. I thought maybe it was just the print I saw off TV but I checked out the DVD version and it appears to be the same there. As other reviewers have mentioned, the one notable gag involves a piano. The rest are pretty forgettable gags involving hammers, dynamite, and bird seed. What hurts the cartoon most of all is the canned music score, which is annoying and below the superior quality of the usual composers who worked in WB animation.
...but Hook, Line and Stinker is not what I consider a favourite. The animation is not too bad, it is solid enough, some of the gags are decent namely the piano gag and the overall quality when watching it on TV or DVD is nice. Also Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote's antics are reasonably funny. However, the running time is disappointingly scant, and I found the pacing rather hectic. But the most disappointing asset was the music. These Looney Tunes usually have great music, with quirky motifs and rousing rhythms, but here I(a musician myself) found the music, as others have pointed out, annoying and repetitive.Overall, not bad, but not great either. 6/10 Bethany Cox
"Hook, Line and Stinker", directed by Chuck Jones, is unfortunately not one of the better cartoons in the Road Runner/Coyote series. The reason for that is because once a gag occurs in this cartoon, we often do not see the aftermath (i.e., what happens to the Coyote after his devices backfire). The only gag of real merit in this cartoon involves a grand piano, and in this case, we DO see how the Coyote ends up, and it is quite funny! One other footnote for "Hook, Line and Stinker": Although the music score by John Seely is not that great, there is one theme that he uses several times in this cartoon that actually became the theme song for the "Dennis the Menace" live-action television series in the early sixties.
Not a bad Roadrunner effort, the film is hindered substantially by a score that will not let up, hammering away at the comedy when silence usually works best when Wile E.'s plans start to fail. Especially unfortunate since this is one where an early Coyote mishap provides an ongoing thread throughout the rest of the short--a nice Jones touch.