What is Stop! Look! and Hasten! about?

In this animated short, Wile E. Coyote tries to capture the Road Runner using a series of impractical inventions, including a Burmese tiger trap and a pop-up steel wall.

Who directed Stop! Look! and Hasten!?

The film was directed by Chuck Jones, a seminal figure in American animation who is famous for his work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series.

Where can I watch this film?

You can find this and other classic Looney Tunes shorts on various streaming platforms. Full schedule on Mood.

Stop! Look! and Hasten! - Jones, 1954 | Showtimes

Daniel's Productions3.5

Fun to return to watching Looney Tunes after a few months break, even if there's basically nothing setting apart Road Runner shorts from each other. That sign 'Stop in the name of humanity' is iconic at least.

QUEEN0FCHA0S3.5

Honestly a very solid short! If not for the rather slow opening I would give this higher. I find it very odd how they always treat each episode as if it's the first time the Coyote and Roadrunner have ever interacted before. But I loved the metal barrier having some setup and payoff, nice nice. The tiger trap and bridge gags were also well executed!Awww and I felt so bad with that dynamite...that could happen to anyone, not just you man.

Carlos Valladares5.0

Available to view here. Please do before reading on; it's only 7 minutes!So I'm on vacation with extended family in Mexico right now. In my downtime from my downtime, I binge-watched a bunch of Road Runner & Coyote cartoons with two of the family-kids (a precocious 3-year-old and a wily 9-year-old). Every time, they would ask me who this "Chuck Jones" person was. As I explained this Jones cat, I realized I was in the midst of Auteurists-in-the-Making. :)But I digress. Of the ones I saw, Stop! Look! and Hasten! stood out to me the most. Now, it shouldn't be the aim of any given Road Runner cartoon to stand out. They function best as shuffle-able, anonymous products. Each short is just an excuse to fill the run-time with as many masochistic gags as possible. The aim: The Road Runner gets away, the Coyote is maimed to increasingly excessive and absurdist degrees. There's only a select few that really stand out: the first Road Runner (Fast and Furry-Ous — it lays out the rules of the Road Runner universe) and the ones which have an unusually high amount of memorable gags (i.e., Whoa, Be Gone! and the repetition of Wile E.'s pissed-off grimace as he falls off the cliff to his dotty death no less than five times; with repetition, comes revolution). Stop! Look! and Hasten! is one of the chosen uniques. It has an identity in many ways:(1) A clever gag involving the use of a Bengali Tiger, who gets his own made-up scientific name in Latin. (Surpriseibus! Surpriseibus!) It breaks the expectation we have (i.e., that only the Road Runner and Coyote get these Latin names). It feels very Tex Avery.(2) Lots of juicy character development in this one. It's done in that distinctly Jonesian way: by the slightest wiggle of an eyebrow, or the Coyote's silent tracing of a windy path on the road with his finger. Nothing distinctly funny happens, but it just goes to show Chuck's mastery of pace, how he shakes things up so that not EVERYTHING is constant laughs. The Coyote's finger-tracing and consternated look says a lot: "The God of this cartoon is going to put me through hell for six minutes, isn't He?" Answer: of course, Wile E. The Road Runners are comically fatalistic, imagining Man's lot to be nothing more than to be the plaything of an unfeeling creator.(3) For a solid minute (an eternity in Looney Time), Chuck frames part of RR's and Wile E.'s chase in a single, upward-downward-panning-shot. The backdrop is the most abstract, simplistic one in maybe all of the Road Runners. (And that's saying a lot.) A good chunk of the frame is sketchpaper white (very proto-Hertzfeldt), with mountains-traintracks-rocks flanking either side of the screen with the authenticity of a Caligari setpiece. Everything is jagged, with Coyote and Road Runner making swift, slashing slices across the train-tracks, as if Jones's Duck Amuck brush had been replaced by the pure movements of an invisible X-Acto knife.Again, the pace is rapid by using the slightest of elements. If the average Tex Avery or Bob Clampett cel is defined by its schizophrenic blobbiness, the average Chuck Jones cel is defined by its sedate stillness, the illusion of no movement in a short that's as erratically paced as the craziest Max Fleischer weidie.(4) SPOILERS! DON'T READ THIS UNTIL YOU'VE SEEN THE ACTUAL SHORT!The most elegant example of a delayed gag in the Jones oeuvre. There's a sliding metal door that Wile E. installs to stop the Road Runner dead in its tracks. Of course, the Road Runner passes and nothing happens. But here's where it gets brilliant. The Coyote approaches it, jumps up and down. And...nothing happens. We are waiting for the moment when the sliding-door pops up and gets the Coyote — and it never comes. We're beside ourselves with giddiness. Then, Gag #3 happens. Just when we've forgotten the sliding door, Road Runner passes by it again, it slides up, and Coyote smashes head-first into it. Chuck, you sneaky sneaky genius, you.I've dismissed the Road Runners in the past because I could never tell any of them apart. What a fool I was! It takes mini-gems like Stop! Look! and Hasten! to show that they may have been Chuck's greatest works. And that kids from any culture, language, or background will love 'em.