The team behind the delightfully chaotic recent run of Max’s Looney Tunes Cartoons led by director Pete Browngardt have pulled off a masterful bombastic feat—right under the nose of a real-life Judge Doom behind an exec desk—with the triumphant The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie.
Believe it or not the film is actually the legendary cartoon’s first fully animated theatrical feature, and it gives us its all in a sci-fi adventure comedy starring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. Eric Bauza pulls double duty in a fantastic turn as the odd-couple duo; Candi Milo co-stars as Petunia Pig, a young flavor scientist who gets roped into finding out why aliens have suddenly decided to invade Earth. You’ll leave the film wanting more Petunia power and presence in the franchise.
The plot harkens back to those retro ’50s style invasion films like The Blob or Invasion of the Body Snatchers but with that slapstick Looney Tunes vibe. Here Daffy and Porky find themselves trying to keep their home while going through job after job that they’re just no good at. Right when they’re hired at a chewing gum factory, an extraterrestrial goo accidentally gets into the mass produced gum’s recipe—and soon threatens the world’s very existence. Suddenly, everyone who has chewed it becomes part of an alien hive mind except for Daffy, Porky, and Petunia. Together they team up to take on the threat to the planet in only the very silly ways you could imagine the Looney Tunes would pull.
As Looney Tunes fans will immediately notice, there’s no Bugs Bunny or Tweety here to carry the movie, and it’s all the better for it. Porky, Daffy, and Petunia are the heart of the film and offer proof that you can take any of the Looney Tunes from their concentric circle portal 2D world and they can star in their own vehicles. While other efforts within the franchise place the focus on the characters as CG versions of themselves alongside the distraction of celebrity or sports stars and product placements, that’s not the case here thankfully.
While the film follows a standard cinematic arc over the sketches the Tunes are known for, there’s plenty of gags that homage their style of classic comedy. That’s particularly seen in the absurdity of Farmer Jim, a fatherly character who apes the warm, deep-voiced kindly dads from that other studio’s animated fare; he exists in a flashback where he takes in Porky and Daffy. I don’t want to say more because it’s specifically a set up that works best visually. Seriously, that along with a few other gags really hit the spot in the film making The Day the Earth Blew Up a non-stop ride of delightful nonsense.
The Day the Earth Blew Up made me so nostalgic for those cartoon films we’ve been missing and you can see the love put in every frame by the Looney Tunes team. This version of the Tunes truly succeeds where The Looney Tunes Show (a series from the early 2010s that put the characters in suburbia) failed. Even though here we start with Daffy and Porky in a domestic setting, their familiar personalities have not been taken over by sitcom tropes or modern comedy sensibilities. Instead, they are true to their iconic archetypes—but they’re given the Bob Clampett treatment of being pushed from normal situational circumstances, like a lack of employment due to Daffy’s daftness and Porky’s shyness, and discovering their job is in fact to save the world by being who they are. And that’s what needed from these gold standard characters as they move into their next era of stories.
We hope Warner Bros. doesn’t forget that and it considers releasing Coyote vs. Acme. The live-action and animation hybrid film still sits on a shelf in a sort of purgatory where it hasn’t been deleted—but with no apparent plans to share it with audiences. And it’s such as shame as it was praised by filmmakers (including Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse‘s Lord and Miller) and insiders who got to see it during the period it was seemingly being shopped around. Fans were left feeling like there was no good reason for the studio to write off a perfectly good movie starring the WB’s global cartoon icons.
Perhaps the release of The Day the Earth Blew Up, a uniquely authentic, fully 2D animated Looney Tunes classic in the making, will remind audiences of the magic of the art style within the medium and make more room for it once more.
The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is in theaters now.
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