Plot

The Coyote employs a series of devices to try to capture the Road Runner.

A famished Wile E. Coyote, (Eatibus Anythingus), trudges across the floor of the desert, catching anything that he can find, from a fly to an empty tin can, with the intention of eating it. Suddenly, he is flattened by the Road Runner, (Hot-roddicus Supersonicus). Wile recovers, blinks his eyes, and has a vision of a wonderful Road Runner feast. He then ditches the tin can and chases after the Road Runner, adopting a low stance to reduce his drag which allows him to close in on the Road Runner, but the bird finds another gear and rockets away, leaving the coyote's eyes to pop out of his sockets. Dejected, he plans his next scheme.

Wile sets up a pulley, rope and rock trap to try smashing the passing Road Runner, hoping its extra complexity will stop Wile from being squashed, but the rock finds a way to squash the coyote as the Road Runner stops to mock him.

A furious Wile arms himself with a lasso as he waits for the Road Runner, but a truck trips the lasso before the bird can get there, and drags Wile across the hard ground. As the coyote paces off the road, we see that the friction has left Wile with a bare rear end.

Wile then uses a How-To book to build a Burmese tiger trap. He digs a square pit in the road and fills it with a sheet camouflaged as a road. As he hides behind a nearby rock, he hears the Road Runner go "beep beep", followed by the sound of the trap being activated. He dives into the pit to capture his prey, but instantly re-emerges and flees in terror when an animal stealthily climbs out of the trap. The animal is subsequently identified as a Burmese Tiger (Surprisibus! Surprisibus!) before it stalks off.

Next, Wile sets up a pop-up grate in the middle of the road with the intention of using it to block the Road Runner. He makes a successful test of the grate's crank control and then re-sets it, but it fails to deploy when the speeding Road Runner passes by. The coyote tries several methods to un-spring the grate without success, then in outrage he resumes his pursuit, only to be stopped at a railroad crossing at which the Road Runner prances slowly along the tracks to taunt his nemesis. The crossing's striped divider lifts Wile into the air. After he falls back down, Wile chases the Road Runner down the railroad tracks, which run through mountains. The two of them pass by opposite lanes and the Road Runner makes a signal to Wile, who stops cold a few seconds later and turns back. He runs past the Road Runner a second time and reverses, but finds that the bird has escaped to a lower track. The coyote finds a way onto the lower track to continue the chase, until an approaching train causes him to dash into and out of a rock face. When the train proceeds across another track, Wile breathes a sigh of relief, until a second train approaches him from inside the rock. The apoplectic coyote holds up a circular sign that says STOP IN THE NAME OF HUMANITY, but since Wile is not human, the only thing that happens is a crash.

Wile then digs a corrugated culvert with the intention of mining the road with TNT, but the wires are short enough for the coyote to pull the detonator over, while a rock squeezes the plunger, causing the TNT to explode while Wile is still inside the culvert.

Wile's next plan is to start a speed motorcycle to chase the passing Road Runner, but the motorcycle sends the coyote into a tree, and its intense engine vibrations jiggle Wile around.

Next, Wile baits a white circle in the middle of a broad suspension bridge with birdseed and hides underneath the bridge to cut the circle while the Road Runner feasts. When the coyote finishes cutting the circle, he falls down with most of the suspension bridge, leaving the Road Runner and the circle floating in mid-air.

The coyote's final attempt to outrun his rival is to ingest some Acme Triple-Strength Fortified Leg Muscle Vitamins. He burns rubber on the road and dashes off, leaving the highway aflame. The Road Runner sees his foe approach, gives a "beep beep", flashes his tongue, and from a standing start he matches the coyote's new-found speed and stays about a second in front. The warp-speed chase continues, with the Coyote cutting the gap down to about half a second in a valley, before the Road Runner gains distance on an uphill grade. They pass along the stretch of road where the coyote had set up the pop-up grate earlier, and after the Road Runner passes over it again, it finally deploys in time for Wile to smash into it.

The Road Runner stops to look at his hapless rival, then starts to burn some more rubber on the road. He spells out the closing sign-off "That's all, Folks!" in smoke before it dissolves to the usual closing title card as a faster and slightly abridged version of the closing theme is played.