Zoom at the Top (1962) User Reviews

Average

[rbverhoef · 6/10 · 25 April 2004]

'Zoom at the Top' is a nice Road Runner v.s Wile E. Coyote cartoon, but not much more than that. Here the Coyote, introduced as Overconfidentii Vulgaris, tries to catch the Road Runner, introduced as Disapperialis Quickius, with a giant bear trap, a rocket, an ice making machine from Acme and finally a boomerang.

The gags are pretty predictable but some of them work pretty good. The moments with the bear trap are very funny and the Coyote says one little word that gave me a big laugh. The final moments with the boomerang are a little too long although the last image makes it nice again. Definitely not the best from the series but a nice entry anyway.

one word

[lee_eisenberg · 7/10 · 10 July 2007]

Probably the main thing that makes "Zoom at the Top" unique is that Wile E. "Overconfidentii Vulgaris" Coyote talks at one: he says "Ouch!". Aside from that, the rest of the cartoon consists of him up to his usual shenanigans to catch Road "Disappearialis Quickius" Runner. Among the traps here are an ice maker and a boomerang.

I also get the feeling that this cartoon was sort of a last gasp of air, as the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies heyday was winding down, to the point where Warner Bros. closed the animation studio in 1963, and so Friz Freleng re-opened it under a new name.

But anyway, it's a really funny cartoon.

Nice entry in the canon, but hardly exceptional

[TheLittleSongbird · 7/10 · 17 June 2010]

Now I enjoy the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons, though I prefer the ones with Bugs and Daffy. Zoom at the Top is worth watching, if unexceptional. The storyline is disappointingly predictable and the final gag is rather drawn out, and the pacing is uneven. Still the animation and music are great, Coyote is very cunning as usual and the gags on the whole are very amusing and well timed.

Overall, I did enjoy Zoom at the Top very much, but I prefer other entries in the series and this one did have problems. Visually and technically I cannot fault it though, and it was amusing. 7/10 I think will be sufficient. Bethany Cox

Overconfidentii Vulgaris

[utgard14 · 6/10 · 28 July 2016]

Everyone's favorite starving coyote is at it again in this middle-of-the-road entry in Chuck Jones' wonderful Road Runner series. This time Wile E. Coyote uses a big trap with ACME bird seed, a cool-looking little jet, an ACME boomerang, and my personal favorite, the ACME Instant Icicle Maker. Some of the gags are a bit on the tired side but the animation is very nice. Love the opening where the action starts before the title pops up. Chuck Jones flexed his creative muscles on this series more than any other. Whenever I'm watching a bunch of Looney Tunes cartoons from the same period, I notice how the more inventive and unique shorts tend to have Jones' name attached. Now, don't get me wrong, there's nothing particularly groundbreaking about this cartoon. But it does have little touches here and there, like the before-title sequence I mentioned, that you didn't see a lot of back then. Anyway, great animation and decent gags. Not one of the best of the series but far from the worst, either.

Only the phenomenally prescient Looney Tuners . . .

[oscaralbert · 7/10 · 13 September 2018]

. . . (aka, the always eponymous Warner Bros.' crack team of Animated Shorts Seers) could (and DID) predict--more than 50 years ago!!--what it would look like if "Der Fuhrer" enjoyed Twitter. When ZOOM AT THE TOP was released, Twitter was just a gleam in the eye of the Far-Off 21st Century. However, if you see ZOOM AT THE TOP for the first time (or review it with the mindset of Thursday, Sept. 13, 2018), you'll surely begin to appreciate the prowess of Warner's animation prognosticators. These pastel-wielding prophets of the paintbrush begin ZOOM AT THE TOP by picturing Wile E. Coyote destroying one of the Hallmarks of Our Once-Great American West, a Natural Stone Arch. Back in the 1900s, before the ascendancy of the USA's Deplorable Pachyderm Party, the worst Western wastrels engaged in the relatively harmless (unless you were of the bovine persuasion) Rite of Cow-Tipping. But the sage savants of Warner were able to warn us of our current Dread Dooms Day, when the Plundering Pachyderms have free rein to run rampant during their Arch-Tipping Reign of Terror on our National Parklands. (You can only ruin an arch or petroglyph or aquifer or sacred grave site or Grand Canyon once, and then it's Gone Forever!) And now, Today--as Warner's warning crew foretold during the Early Sixties--the Pachyderm's Polluter-in-Chief cackles on Twitter about how the PR population does NOT count. To paraphrase this Public Menace, "Who's to say that a life of an Islander is worth more than another serving of caviar for a Fat Cat One Per Center?" Certainly, if Adolph had had Twitter, he'd be tweeting in the same vein about the "Fake News" of the Holocaust, and how the Nuremberg Trials were a "Witch Hunt" trying to prove his Collusion with the Gestapo. ZOOM AT THE TOP labels this sort of thing as "Overconfidentii Vulgarius," as an evil Carrot Top tries to make the PR Islanders "Disappearialis Quickius."

Unslient Coyote is entertaining for families to enjoy.

[mattsumm · 5/10 · 13 April 2023]

In this short Wile E. Did make a few sounds here and there showing he's not completely silent giving Mel Blanc the opportunity to make the clownishly cunning coyote actually sound reactive to his circumstances, especially as the lead antagonist - the way he broke the fourth wall after the debacle with the giant bear trap was almost predictable. That "ouch" was funny to most, I'm sure, but nearly standard for my liking. Him panting while falling from the cliff on the coney end at the beginning gave a slightly more active feel for the hapless coyote, while the gripping sequence itself somewhat illustrated the opposite meaning for the title of this short: "Zoom at the Top" - more like: "Zoom at the Bottom". His sign of relief after he succeeds in getting his left hand off the iron glue coated boomerang while airborne then subsequently putting his iron glue covered hand on his head deliriously laughing it off shows his ineptitude more compellingly in this case.