Acme Corporation
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The Acme Corporation is a fictional corporation that exists in several cartoons, films and TV series, most significantly in the Looney Tunes universe, where it appeared most prominently in the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons, which made Acme famous for outlandish and downright dangerous products that failed catastrophically at the worst possible times. The inspiration for the name came as something of a parody on the name "Acme", which became a ubiquitous name in the 1950s for businesses in the United States. It was also frequently used as a running gag.
The word acme means highest level, or top of the line, similar to apex. It is also an acronym that stands for "A Company that Makes Everything".
The first of the Acme Corporation was in Looney Tunes in a Buddy cartoon (Buddy's Bug Hunt).[citation needed] It also appeared in the Egghead cartoon Count Me Out in which Egghead purchases a "Learn How To Box" kit from Acme. In the Road Runner cartoon Beep, Beep, it was referred as "Acme Rocket-Powered Products, Inc." based in Fairfield, NJ.
The company is never clearly defined but appears to be a conglomerate which produces everything and anything imaginable, no matter how elaborate or extravagant—none of which works as desired or expected.[citation needed] An example is the Acme Giant Rubber band , subtitled "(For Tripping Road Runners)", which would appear to be produced specifically for Wile E. Coyote. Acme is often used whenever a cartoon, film or similar needs a corporation for a product, and instead of using an existing company name (perhaps leading to trademark issues) or making one they simply use Acme.
In the 1920s, when categorized business telephone directories (such as the Yellow Pages) began to be popular, there was a flood of businesses named Ace or Acme (some of these still survive[1]); the Acme name was so heavily used that it became something of a joke. The joke spread to Warner Bros. cartoons; in 1949, it made its first appearance in a Road Runner cartoon.
As a practical note, the name also a useful device that cartoon directors use to give a product the real-world convention of having been manufactured by a company with a brand without having to deal with trademark issues.[citation needed]
The company name is ironic since the word acme is derived from Greek (ακμή; English transliteration: acmē) meaning the peak, zenith or prime. Generally, products from the fictional Acme Corporation are very generic and tend to fail — though often this could be attributed to operator error or misapplication of the product.[citation needed]
Acme delivery service, on the other hand, is second to none. Wile E. can merely drop an order into a mailbox (or enter an order on a website, as seen in the Looney Tunes: Back in Action movie), and have the defective and/or dangerous product in his hands (or on top of him) within seconds. Early Sears catalogs contained a number of products with the "Acme" trademark, including anvils, which are frequently-used props in Warner Bros. cartoons[2].
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[edit] Appearances
The name Acme is used as a generic corporate name in a huge number cartoons, comics, television shows (as early as an I Love Lucy episode), film (as early as 1936 in Follow the Fleet, when Fred Astaire uses "Acme Sodium Bicarbonate") and other media.
They are far too numerous to list. Examples which specifically reference the Wile E. Coyote meme include:
- The Tiny Toons Adventures series expanded on Acme's influence, with the entire setting of the show taking place in a city called "Acme Acres". The show's young protagonists attended "Acme Looniversity." Calamity Coyote often bought products from the fictional Acme company in his quest to catch the road-runner Little Beeper. In one episode, the company revealed its slogan: "For fifty years, the leader in creative mayhem."
- The 2003 movie Looney Tunes: Back in Action showed the head offices of Acme, revealed to be a multinational corporation whose executive officers were led by a Bond-esque supervillain called "Mr. Chairman" who is the main antagonist in the movie.
- The cartoon series, Loonatics Unleashed, is set in Acmetropolis.
- The 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit attempted to explain Acme's inner workings in greater detail. The movie's plot is centered on the murder of Marvin K. Acme, the multi-millionaire founder and CEO of Acme Incorporated. His motto was, "If it's Acme, it's a gasser!" Many of the film's scenes involve Acme products, and the climactic scene of the film is set in the Acme factory.
[edit] Films and TV series
- 1988 - In the Steven Spielberg movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the plot of the movie is that Roger Rabbit is framed for the murder of Marvin Acme, the owner of Acme Corporation, and a lot of the cartoon products was made by ACME.
- 2003 - In the movie Looney Tunes: Back In Action, the Acme corporation appears as an evil organization with world-domination aspirations.
[edit] Music
- In Five for Fighting's song "World," they reference a product called "A.C.M.E's Build-a-World-to-Be" with the subtitle, "Take a chance, grab a piece."
- In Bell X1's song "One Stringed Harp", there is a lyric "Like Wily Coyote/As if the fall wasn't enough/Those bastards from Acme/They got more nasty stuff".
[edit] Legal humor
- Ian Frazier wrote a fictional opening statement as a humor article in The New Yorker Magazine (v66, Feb 26, 1990, p. 42) in the form of a lawsuit by Wile E. Coyote against the Acme Products Company. The piece is the title work of his collection, Coyote v. Acme. [3]
[edit] Other
- The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network provides an "Acme::" namespace which contains many humorous, useless and abstract modules for the Perl programming language[4].
- Several owners' manuals for electronic products indicate that only the company's brand of AC adapter should be used with the product, with a drawing of an "Acme brand" AC adapter connected to the product, with a red X over the adapter.
[edit] See also
- ACME Detective Agency from the Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? series
- ACME Communications, producer of The Daily Buzz.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- "Coyote vs Acme" - Mock legal opening statement
