Today I Learned The Origin Of The ACME Corporation From Looney Toones Road Runner Cartoons

For those of you who didn't spend your childhood with your eyes glued to the TV screen watching Saturday morning cartoons, ACME is the name of the fictional company that appeared in almost every Road Runner and Wiley Coyote cartoon.

This company supplied Wiley Coyote with a never ending range of ridiculous products that would inevitably fail, generally with hilarious consequences.

Image credit

So, where did the name come from? Some people think that the name ACME is an acronym for a company that makes everything, but this is a coincidence being that ACME was used in Hollywood since as early as 1920 in Buster Keaton's movie, Neighbors and by corporations before that and acronyms weren't even a thing humans did at that point in time.

In fact, previous to the mid-twentieth century, while abbreviations were prevalent in text, pronouncing them in words was not something that people did, being something of a modern phenomenon.

According to linguist David Wilton:

"There is only one known pre-twentieth-century, English word with an acronymic origin and it was in vogue for only a short time in 1886. The word is "colinderies" or "colinda", an acronym for the Colonial And Indian Exposition Held In London that year."

No surprise then that the word acronym didn't pop up until 1943. So if that's not where the name came from, what is?

Without a doubt, the company name is used ironically in the Looney Toons cartoon.

ACME comes from the Greek meaning peak, zenith, prime, so in the case of the company essentially meaning best, when in fact, the products offered by the company in the show are invariably prone to disaster, something which ACME even acknowledges through its slogan; "Quality is our number one dream".

In the 1920's alphabetized phone books like The Yellow Pages were growing in popularity, resulting in businesses re-branding under a different name in order to get to the top of the list and get seen by more people. ACME was a hugely popular choice for a name at the time since the letters A and C are close to the beginning of the alphabet and the definition of the word suggests superiority.

In more modern times Amazon.com did the same type of thing when re-branding from Cadabra to Amazon, attempting to place more closely to the top of listings of the alphabetized browsing indexes.

In any event, Chuck Jones, writer, director and animator who worked on Merry Melodies and, of course, was Looney Toons cartoonist for over three decades, touched on the names' more specific origin in an interview carried out for the 2009 film, Chuck Jones - Memories Of Childhood, in which he explained:

"Since we had to search out our own entertainment, we devised our own fairy stories. If you wanted a bow and arrow, you got a stick. If you wanted to conduct an orchestra, you got a stick. If you wanted a duel, you used a stick. You couldn't go and buy one. That's where the term ACME came from. Whenever we played a game where we had a grocery store or something, we called it the ACME Corporation. Why? Because in The Yellow Pages if you looked, say, under drugstores, you'd find the first one would be ACME Drugs. Why? Because "AC" was about as high as you could go. It means the best, the superlative."

So although the fictional company may boast an interesting line of products including the ACME Building Disintegrator and the ACME Ultimatum Dispatcher, the origin of its name isn't quite as exciting. It was simply a commonly used name at the time, inferring a company that was the best, which the guys at Looney Toons adopted and used with their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks.

Image credit

Bonus Facts

Fact 1: The fastest recorded speed for an actual greater road-runner bird is 26 miles per hour (42 kilometers per hour) and coyotes have a top speed of 40 miles per hour or 64 kilometers per hour.

Fact 2: In the cartoon ACME is eventually revealed as being a wholley, owned subsidiary of Road Runner Corporation, which of course indicates that Road Runner was in control of the companies products. His position would then allow him to pass on all the faulty or untested goods to Wiley Coyote thereby sabotaging his plan before it was even put into action.

---

---