Where the Looney Tune’s “ACME” Corporation Name Came From
For those of you who didn’t spend your childhood with your eyes glued to the TV screen watching
Saturday morning cartoons, “ACME” is the name of the fictional company that appeared
in almost every Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon.
This company supplied Wile E. Coyote with a never-ending range of ridiculous products
that would inevitably fail, generally with hilarious consequences.
So where did this name come from?
Some people think that ACME is an acronym for “A Company that Makes Everything”.
But this is little more than a happy coincidence given that “ACME” had been being used
in Hollywood since as early as 1920 in Buster Keaton’s movie, Neighbors, and by corporations
before that, and acronyms weren’t even a thing humans did at this point in time.
In fact, previous to the mid-20th century, while abbreviations were prevalent in text,
pronouncing them as words was not something people typically did, being something of a
very modern phenomenon.
According to linguist David Wilton, “There is only one known pre-twentieth-century [English]
word with an acronymic origin and it was in vogue for only a short time in 1886.
The word is “colinderies” or “colinda”, an acronym for the Colonial and Indian Exposition
held in London in that year.”
No surprise then that the word “acronym” didn’t pop up until 1943.
So if that’s not where the name came from, what is?
Without a doubt, the company name is used ironically in the Looney Tunes cartoons.
“ACME” comes from the Greek, meaning “peak” / “zenith” / “prime”, so in the case
of the company, essentially meaning “best”, when in fact the products offered by the corporation
in the show are invariably prone to disaster, something which ACME even acknowledges through
its slogan – “Quality is our #1 dream”.
In the 1920s alphabetized phone books – like the Yellow Pages – were growing in popularity,
resulting in businesses re-branding under a different name in order to get to the top
of the list and get seen by more people.
ACME was a hugely popular choice for a name at the time, since the letters AC are close
to the beginning of the alphabet and the definition of the word suggests superiority.
In more modern times, Amazon.com did this same type of thing when rebranding from “Cadabra”
to “amazon”, attempting to be put closer to the top of alphabetical online browsing
indexes.
In any event, Chuck Jones – writer, director, and animator who worked on Merrie Melodies
and, of course, Looney Tunes cartoons for over 3 decades – touched upon the name’s
more specific origin in an interview carried out for the 2009 film Chuck Jones: Memories
of Childhood, in which he explained: “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 term ACME came from.
Whenever we played a game where we had a grocery store or something, we called it the ACME
Corporation.
Why?
Because in the yellow pages if you looked, say, under drugstores, you’d find the first
one would be Acme Drugs.
Why?
Because “AC” was about as high as you could go.
It means the best, the superlative.”
So although the fictional company may boast an interesting line of products – including
the ACME Building Disintegrator and ACME Ultimatum Dispatcher – the origin of its name isn’t
quite as exciting.
It was simply a commonly used name at the time, inferring a company was the best, which
the guys at Looney Tunes adopted and used with their tongues firmly planted in their
cheeks.
Bonus Facts • The fastest recorded speed for an actual
“Greater Roadrunner” bird is 26 mph (42 kp/h).
The kicker?
Coyotes have a top speed of over 40 mph (64 km/h).
• In the cartoon, ACME is eventually revealed as being “A Wholly-Owned Subsidiary of Roadrunner
Corporation”, which of course indicates that Road Runner was in control of the company’s
products.
His position would then allow him to pass on all the faulty or untested goods to Wile.
E. Coyote, thereby sabotaging his plan before it even was put into action