When it comes to fictitious enterprises that we know and love, it’s hard to get any more known and loveable than the ACME Corporation. A well-known supplier of everything from anvils to poultry to Do-It Yourself tornado kits, ACME has built its place in our hearts as the one driving factor behind why a malnourished super-genius like Wile E. Coyote can’t catch his lunch. Of course, Wile can certainly catch three-ton boulders, but I digress.

However, as much as we all enjoy watching hungry animals be blown to bits, it is rather bizarre that ACME has kept itself in business for this long. With the amount of faulty catapults and cannons, one would suspect that ACME would not be a friend of the Better Business Bureau. Yet, since first supplying Wile the ACME Super Outfit in the 1949 cartoon “Fast and Furry-ous,” Wile and his colleagues have used the company almost exclusively. And with the Steve Carrol movie about ACME in the works, now is the time to ask what the secret is to ACME’s success. Do they have a PR team of Morgan Freeman and a thousand puppies? Are Shapiro and Kardashian defending them in claims court? Or are they secretly an Evil corporate conglomerate bent on world domination?

(We’re going with the last option, in case you weren’t sure.)

They Have Sweatshops of EVIL:

Truly Evil organizations are like Dreamworks; they can’t do much without Minions. Human capital is indispensable in any good corporate environment. After all, you need someone to operate the forklifts, man the lasers, file the TPS reports, and other essential duties. Ray guns and bullet-proof shark tanks don’t grow on trees, you know. And by the sheer number of things the ACME company produces (rocket powered skates, weather balloons, Just-Add-Water women), it wouldn’t be too far off to say that ACME likely employs several hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

A majority being drugged child laborers.

Yup, Saturday morning cartoon’s ACME Company actively employs underage children in order to build their anvils, blow up dolls, and rocket missiles. In Looney Tunes: Back in Action, we see that the ACME Corporation has a Vice President of Child Labor, alone implying the massive amount of diabolical babysitting this company does. But this movie goes the extra baby-step of showing how ACME fired its nine-year-old employees and hired three-year-olds to replace them, and said that the children would be unknowingly consuming caffeine in order to work through naptimes. Not only is ACME engaging in incredibly illegal child labor, it is creating the next generation of hipster coffee addicts, all in the name of lowering production costs for terrible products that backfire.

They Have Global Immunity of EVIL:

Unlike what your kindergarten teacher taught you, in the real world, people don’t like sharing. Intelligence and police agencies bicker over who has the rights to investigate crimes, interrogate suspects, and hold evidence, as well as who can make the coolest acronym. And though I was sure that ACME stood for “Absolutely Completely Mutherf****** Evil,” it doesn’t mean anything after all.

But on the other hand, they do have a detective agency that ranks above all security organizations in the world. So maybe they just don’t need a snazzy letter arrangement.

How many of us spent hours of our childhood fighting crime and solving geography puzzles in the Carmen Sandiego games? Matching wits with one of the greatest thieves in the world, all under the watchful gaze of the ACME Detective Agency? Did any of us spend our sleuthing skills to try and understand why a company with a penchant for building dynamite would need its own private security forces?

True, ACME spends its time watching out for precious relics and monuments, but does it strike anyone else as odd that every other security force in the world will drop their doughnuts to help ACME? In the criminally underrated (see what I did there?) cartoon series “Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?” teen detectives Zack and Ivy only need to flash their ACME badges in order to get past any line of police tape, and victims of the thefts are only too eager to share their information with a team where just half of the members can legally vote in the U.S. Are the ACME Detectives highly trained examples of the aforementioned Evil child labor? Maybe.

But the biggest threat against national security that ACME’s Detective Agency has? ACME utilizes a fancy-schmancy device called a C5 Corridor – a teleportation device that allows the ACME agents to travel anywhere in the world. Forget trying to find Carmen Sandiego, ACME could be placing sleeper agents from here to Timbuktu. They won’t get frequent flier miles for their troubles, of course. But the ACME Detectives used the C5 Corridor to escape from jail in episode “Retribution (3): Maelstrom’s Revenge.” And who is to say they wouldn’t use it again for EVIL purposes?

They Have Laboratories of EVIL:

I think that we’d all like to take a tour through the research and development branch of ACME – any company who’s employees can pitch crazy-ass ideas like earthquake pills, iron carrots, or explosive tennis balls and then get them approved clearly must be using the hookiest of hookahs. But I shouldn’t judge. Genius is never appreciated in its time, after all. And though ACME may partake in building some incredible war-grade weapons for Wal-Mart style prices (did you ever see Wile with a credit card?), it’s not like they’ve ever created a doomsday weapon that could actually work.

Except they totally did. And they have four.

Pinky and the Brain, beloved classic cartoon characters that they are, are not lab mice that ACME Labs uses to test their merchandise. They are mice created in a lab, and this is an important distinction. In Pinky and the Brain episode “Brainwashed,” ACME scientist Dr. Mordough used his ACME funded machine, the ACME Gene Splicer, Bagel Warmer, and Hot Dog Steamer (Have we said ACME too many times?) to genetically splice Pinky and Brain into having above-average intelligence. But what a lot of people may not remember is that there were two other animals that got mentally upgraded: Snowball the Hamster and Precious the Cat. And rather than apply their intelligences to ask why you never meet tall old people or why you bother saving the National Geographic magazines, all four of these pint-sized prodigies engage in new plans to take over the world every night!

True, these plans fail. But each one comes very close, and the failure can be attributed to these animals not working together. Snowball and Precious’ plans are ruined by the mice, and Brain’s plans are ruined because he doesn’t listen to Pinky. If these critters put their eggheads together, the world would pay them – and thus ACME – whatever was necessary to keep the peace. It’s only a matter of time before the answer to “What are we doing tomorrow night?” becomes “I’m thinking watching reruns.”

And what’s truly Evil about all of this? PETA hasn’t complained once.

They Have Magic Powers of EVIL:

ACME’s incredible technological advancements have most certainly earned them their place as the second highest grossing company in Forbe’s 2007 List of 25 Largest Fictional Companies; ACME is estimated to be worth 348.7 billion dollars – with a B. As in Bugs “Be Buying 14 Karat Carrots” Bunny. Clearly they must be doing something right with their child labor, private police force, and secret laboratories to warrant such an incredible revenue stream that makes stock in Microsoft look like spare change.

Or maybe the execs at ACME are cackling over a cauldron.

I think most of us are familiar with the story of Camelot – and no, it’s not a place to park your camel, DAD. A kingdom with King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table and Lady of the Lake and swallows of both the English and African variety. It’s a silly place, right?

I confess, I learned the majority of my Camelot knowledge from Monty Python, but a few facts also came from a 1998 animated feature simply titled “Quest for Camelot.” The villain in this film, the contraceptively named Ruber, planned to overthrow the kingdom by using his army of machine-man hybrids. And a machine-chicken voiced by Urkel. Go figure. Ruber built this army using a potion that he said he “bought from some witches.” But look this up for yourself here, because the label clearly says ‘ACME.’

So either ACME was founded in 1000 C.E. and even then knew how to build the incredibly impossible, or ACME cooked up a portal to the fictional world of Camelot. Regardless of how powerful you want to depict them as, they sold a potion that would bind man and machine to a very clearly Evil man for the express purpose of dissolving a major government system. With magic.

They're All EVIL, Folks!

Though news of it has died down, Warner Bros. has been working on developing an ACME movie with Steve Carrol for years. Though the chances of the movie ever reaching the light of day are by now slim to none, I can’t help but feel nervous about the whole thing, knowing what I know about the evil that is ACME. Who knows what part of our government they’ve infiltrated? Who knows which of our celebrities they’ve adopted into their ranks? Who knows when they will strike next? I beg of you, if the film ever does reach the theatres, be wary of it for the true propaganda it was intended to be.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go hide before some mad ACME execs make it “Casey” season.