See the 9 Strict Rules Every 'Road Runner' Cartoon Had to Follow

Rule 8: "Whenever possible, make gravity the coyote's greatest enemy."

Try as hard as he might, Wile E. Coyote could never quite catch the Road Runner. Now, the nine rules set for the series by the creator behind the Looney Tunes classic, which stacked the deck against the character, have caused much social media buzz.

Chuck Jones' rules that governed each and every encounter between Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote have gone viral on Twitter after director Amos Posner shared a page from the 1999 autobiography of Jones, Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist.

The nine strict rules made sure there was no dialogue apart from "beep beep," that every episode was set in the American southwest, that Wile E. Coyote only shopped at Acme Corporation despite the appalling success rate of their products and, most tellingly, gravity was to be the coyote's worst enemy whenever possible.

Other rules include that the Road Runner had to stay on the road — for obvious reasons — that Road Runner could not harm Coyote except for taunting him with "beep beep," that Coyote was more humiliated than harmed by his failures, that his failures were always due to his own ineptitude or the unreliability of Acme products and, finally, that Coyote's fanaticism meant that he could not stop despite his continued failure.

Taken together, Coyote was never going to win.