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"We were little madcaps along the beach and we did what we enjoyed doing and could get dirty and could eat hot dogs and so on. 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 terms acme came from. Whenever we played a game where we had a grocery store or something we called it 'ACME.' Why? Because in the yellow pages if you looked, say, under drugstores, you'd find the first one would be ACME Drugs. Why? Because "A.C." was about as high as you could go; it means the best; the superlative."





ACME is a fictional corporation that features prominently in the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons as a running gag featuring outlandish products that Wile E. misuses in complicated contraptions fail catastrophically. The name is also used in many other cartoons, films, and TV series, besides the Road Runner cartoons. The word acme is derived from Greek meaning the peak, zenith, or prime.

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Origin

The name "Acme" became popular for businesses by the 1920s, when alphabetized business telephone directories such as the Yellow Pages began to be widespread and businesses wanted their name to be at the top of the list. There were a flood of businesses named "Acme" (some of these still survive). For example, early Sears catalogs contained a number of products with the "Acme" trademark, including anvils, which are frequently used in Warner Bros. cartoons, particularly in Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoons.

Fictional Depiction

The company is never clearly defined in Road Runner cartoons, but appears to be a conglomerate which produces every product type imaginable, no matter how elaborate or extravagant. In the Road Runner cartoon "Beep, Beep", it was referred to as "Acme Rocket-Powered Products, Inc." based in Fairfield, New Jersey. Many of its products appear to be produced specifically for Wile E. Coyote, for example, the ACME Giant Rubber Band, subtitled "For Tripping Road Runners."

Sometimes, ACME can also send living creatures through the mail, though that isn't done very often. Two examples of this are the ACME Wild-Cat, which are used on Elmer Fudd and Sam Sheepdog (which doesn't maul its intended victim, possibly due to the former having a gun and the latter being a big dog); and ACME Bumblebees in one-fifth bottles (which sting Wile E. Coyote). The Wild Cat is used in the shorts "Don't Give Up the Sheep" and "A Mutt in a Rut", while the bees are used in the short "Zoom and Bored".

While their products leave much to be desired, ACME delivery service is second to none; Wile E. can merely drop an order into a mailbox (or enter an order on a website, as in the Looney Tunes: Back in Action movie), and have the product in his hands within seconds.

In one of the later cartoons, it is revealed that ACME is "A Wholly-Owned Subsidiary Of Roadrunner Corporation," suggesting that The Road-Runner possibly controlled the nature of the products that Wile E. ordered so that they would backfire.

Also see the List of ACME Products

Appearances

The name "Acme" is used as a fake corporate name in a huge number of cartoons, comics, television shows (as early as an I Love Lucy episode), and films (as early as Buster Keaton's 1920 silent film Neighbors and Harold Lloyd's 1922 film Grandma's Boy).

Examples which specifically reference the Wile E. Coyote meme include:

Animated Films, TV series

Live-Action Films, TV Series

The 1988 comedy/mystery film Who Framed Roger Rabbit attempts to explain ACME's inner workings in detail. The movie's storyline is centered on the murder of Marvin Acme, the founder of ACME. Many of the film's scenes involve ACME products, and the climactic scene of the film is set in the ACME factory. ACME also appears to make non-Toonish devices, and even has a company slogan: "If it's ACME, it's a gasser."

attempts to explain ACME's inner workings in detail. The movie's storyline is centered on the murder of Marvin Acme, the founder of ACME. Many of the film's scenes involve ACME products, and the climactic scene of the film is set in the ACME factory. ACME also appears to make non-Toonish devices, and even has a company slogan: "If it's ACME, it's a gasser." In the movie Armageddon (1998), a reference is made to Wile E.'s failed attempts to catch The Road-Runner with an ACME rocket.

(1998), a reference is made to Wile E.'s failed attempts to catch The Road-Runner with an ACME rocket. In Last Action Hero, ACME products (ACME dynamite, ACME Storage Center cardboard boxes, ACME video store, old ACME Engineering sign, ACME construction crane...) can be seen in the Jack Slater IV movie. An excerpt from a Wile E. Coyote/Road-Runner cartoon is also shown early in the movie.

ACME products (ACME dynamite, ACME Storage Center cardboard boxes, ACME video store, old ACME Engineering sign, ACME construction crane...) can be seen in the movie. An excerpt from a cartoon is also shown early in the movie. In the web series Web Therapy (2009), a reference is made to ACME by Lisa Kudrow's character Fiona Wallice as an unreliable D.N.A. lab, its label including "a roadrunner and a coyote."

Music

Bell X1's song "One Stringed Harp" includes the lyric "Like Wile E. Coyote/As if the fall wasn't enough/Those [morons] from ACME/They got more nasty stuff".

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 ACME. The piece is the title work of his collection, Coyote Vs. ACME.

Other

The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network provides an "ACME" namespace which contains many humorous, useless and abstract modules for the Perl programming language.

It is a common misconception that ACME is an acronym standing for such things as "A Company that Makes Everything," "American Companies Make Everything," or "American Company that Manufactures Everything".