Speedy Gonzalez and the Road Runner compete in a match race to determine which is the fastest. As they speed along the empty desert roads, they are respectively pursued by Sylvester and Wile E. Coyote. However, the multiple traps designed to stop the racers constantly backfire on the shabby predators.
A bad idea that resulted in a terrible execution, “The Wild Chase” is a lazy work that recycles slapstick footage from a trio of Road Runner cartoons – “Zoom and Bored” (1957), “Wild About Hurry” (1959), and “Hopalong Casualty” (1960) – by sloppily adding Sylvester to Wile E. Coyote’s various attempts to catch his avian target. The finished product is one of the most-slovenly animated films to come out under the Warner Bros. banner.
Outside of one gag with the Road Runner startling Sylvester to jump off a cliff and land on Wile E. (who is climbing up the cliff), the racers have little to do and are mostly unaware of the destructive chaos that their foes unleash on themselves.
The happenings behind the camera on “The Wild Chase” were more interesting than anything on the screen. This was the only Road Runner cartoon with Friz Freleng at the helm (he shared co-directing credit with Hawley Pratt) and it was also Freleng’s final theatrical short at Warner Bros. It also turned out to be the last Speedy cartoon with Sylvester as his enemy – Daffy Duck took over that mouse-chasing job for a string of cartoons that were so atrocious at every imaginable level that it made “The Wild Chase” look like “What’s Opera, Doc?” in comparison.