Acme Corporation

The Acme Corporation is a fictional corporation that exists in several cartoons, films and TV series, most significantly in the Looney Tunes universe. It appeared most prominently in the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons, which made Acme famous for outlandish and downright dangerous products that fail catastrophically at the worst possible times. In the 1920s, when categorized (and, more importantly, alphabetized) business telephone directories (such as the Yellow Pages) began to be popular, there was a flood of businesses named Ace or Acme (some of these still survive); it only increased in popularity in the 1950s for businesses in the United States. The Acme name was so heavily used that it became something of a joke.