An ACME brand package

The Acme Corporation is a fictional corporation that exists in several cartoons, films and TV series, most significantly in the Looney Tunes universe. It appeared most prominently in the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons, which made Acme famous for outlandish and downright dangerous products that fail catastrophically at the worst possible times. In the 1920s, when categorized (and, more importantly, alphabetized) 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]); it only increased in popularity in the 1950s for businesses in the United States. The Acme name was so heavily used that it became something of a joke.

The company name is ironic since the word acme is derived from Greek (ακμή; English transliteration: acmē) meaning the peak, zenith or prime, and products from the fictional Acme Corporation are both generic and tend to fail.

A.C.M.E. has also been used as a backronym meaning "A Company that Makes Everything". This can be rendered as a recursive acronym ("Acme Company Makes Everything").

One of the first appearances 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. Another early appearance was as the "Acme Jewellery Co" in Harold Lloyd's silent film "Grandma's Boy" in 1922.

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. An example is the Acme Giant Rubber Band, subtitled "(For Tripping Road Runners)", which would appear to be produced specifically for Wile E. Coyote.

While their products leave much to be desired, 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.

An ACME brand package

Early Sears catalogs contained a number of products with the "Acme" trademark, including anvils, which are frequently-used props in Warner Bros. cartoons[2].

Perhaps coincidentally, "Acme" is a standard of registration pins on animation discs, on which the cartoons are created. Acme registration is the mainstream standard of pins and holes that allow animation cels to be consistently aligned. (An alternative registration is Oxberry (or Oxbury) standard.)

Appearances

The name "Acme" is used as a generic corporate name in a huge number of 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:

Animated films, TV series

• 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 supervillain called "Mr. Chairman".
• The cartoon series, Loonatics Unleashed, is set in Acmetropolis.
• The Acme Company appeared in three Woody Woodpecker cartoons
• One of Acme Company's base stations in New York appear in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode Leonardo Cuts Loose.
• In Family Guy, Peter is seen running an Acme store and Wile E. Coyote is seen talking to him.
• In the 1998 Warner Bros. animated film Quest for Camelot, the bottle with the villain Ruber's merging potion is labelled "acme" as a homage.

Live-action films, TV series

• The 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit attempted to explain Acme's inner workings in detail. The movie's plot is centered on the murder of the founder of Acme Incorporated. Many of the film's scenes involve Acme products, and the climactic scene of the film is set in the Acme factory.
• In the movie "Armageddon" (1998), a reference is made to Coyote's failed attempts to catch the Road Runner with an Acme rocket

Music

• Bell X1's song "One Stringed Harp" includes the lyric "Like Wile E. Coyote/As if the fall wasn't enough/Those bastards 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 the Acme Products Company. The piece is the title work of his collection, Coyote v. Acme (New York: Noonday Press) 1997 ISBN 0374524912; ISBN 978-0374524913.[3]

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.

See also

• ACME Detective Agency from the Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? series
• ACME Communications, an American television station chain.
• Disney's Ajax

References

External links

• "Coyote vs Acme" (Archived 2009-10-24) - Mock legal opening statement