Licensing

Ever since Chuck Jones drew the first Roadrunner character into the 1949 Looney Tunes cartoon "Fast and Furry-ous", he has been frantically escaping from Wile E. Coyote (by the way, the E, stands for Ethelbert, according to Wikipedia) and both characters have been wildly popular. So it comes as no surprize that many attempts have been made to benefit from Wile, his buddy and the Acme Safe Company. Today the curator of the Chuck Jones legend is the Chuck Jones Center for Creativity (https://www.chuckjonescenter.org) and Chuck Jones' grandson Craig Kausen is the man to talk to for permission to use any of Mr. Jones' characters.

The mission of the Center is to encourage creativity in children of all ages. This aligned well with our idea for a non-commercial and creative use of the Roadrunner and Wile characters. We do plan to use the balloon for outreach to the youth of Albuquerque and the surroudning areas. Craig enthusiastically gave us permission to put the characters on our balloon. His only stipulationws that we protect Warner Brothers copyright by ackowledging that on the envelope. We have done that in four places aroudn the base of teh balloon.

By the way, also according to Wikipedia Jones based the coyote on Mark Twain's book Roughing It, in which Twain described the coyote as "a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton" that is "a living, breathing allegory of Want."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wile_E._Coyote_and_the_Road_Runner