A Company that Makes Everything

Today I took a group of boys from my facility off campus to do some community service.  We went to a nearby city where we loaded up a U-Haul truck with items and took them to another site where we unloaded them into an empty building.

As I was supervising, I glanced away from the boys for just a moment and an old truck and trailer sitting on the neighboring property caught my eye.  As soon as I read the side of the trailer, I knew I had to get a picture.

It read, “ACME Transfer, Fort Dodge, Iowa.”

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Like many of you, as a kid, among my favorite Saturday morning pastimes was watching cartoons, especially those made by Warner Bros/Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies.  You know, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig.  And, of course, there were the never-ending attempts by Wile E. Coyote to capture the speedy Roadrunner.

Poor Wile E. spent a lot of money buying parts for his inventions, or purchasing things as simple as an anvil, which he would try to drop on the fast bird.  He’d push the heavy anvil to the edge of a high precipice, only to have the cliff break off, plummeting both him and the anvil downward.  Then, defying the laws of physics, Mr. Coyote would hit the ground first only to be smashed by the heavy steel anvil, which, we all knew, was manufactured by the ACME Corporation.

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In fact, we learned that, if an item was made by ACME, it was sure to malfunction, fail, or backfire at the absolute worst time it could possibly happen.

There is no explanation why Wile E. Coyote kept buying from ACME.  Heck, in one cartoon we found that the corporation’s slogan is, “Quality is our #1 dream.”  Maybe they are the only company that will sell to a coyote.  I don’t know.

What I did notice in one cartoon is that ACME is “A Wholly-Owned Subsidiary of Roadrunner Corporation.”  That makes me think in one episode, when the song-dog holds up a sign reading, “Wile E. Coyote: Super Genius,” he might be exaggerating just a little.

But, other than in the cartoon world, is there really a business named ACME?

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Where did the cartoon makers come up with the name ACME for the coyote’s make-believe products?

Well, in the 1920s telephone companies were publishing alphabetized telephone books.  Companies whose names came closer to the beginning of the alphabet appeared earlier and were thus among the first to be noticed by readers looking for a certain type of business.  Some companies changed their names to be found in the front of the book or Yellow Pages.  Derived from a Greek word meaning peak, zenith, or prime, ACME was a logical choice.

Chuck Jones – writer, director, and animator who worked on Merrie Melodies and, of course, Looney Tunes cartoons for over three decades – touched upon the name’s 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, (as a kid) 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.”

Yeah, like I said.

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By the way, ACME isn’t really an acronym, a pronunciation of letters standing for a name.  A Company that Makes Everything is what some fans think ACME stands for, but that’s actually an example of a “backronym” – a phrase made up to match the letters.  In other words, fans made it up.

So ACME stands for ACME.

The cartoons were not even the first to use ACME on film.  I’m not sure who really was but, I do know it was used as early as 1920, when it appeared in Buster Keaton’s movie, Neighbors.

On a final note, in the early 20^th century, no less a company than Sears Roebuck (now just Sears), advertised that they carried an, ACME American Wrought Anvil.

I wonder if Sears sold a lot of them to coyotes.

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