ACME first became famous through Warner Bros Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons, where the ACME Corporation supplied Wile E. Coyote with endless mail-order devices for catching the Road Runner. The name itself is a joke on acme, meaning the peak or best, which made the constant malfunctions even funnier. Over decades of reruns, parodies and memes, ACME stopped being just a cartoon label and became universal shorthand for any overengineered product destined to fail, which is why this short stamp still works far outside the original cartoons.