A Looney Tunes Movie Review: 'The Day the Earth Blew Up'

"We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day."
-Chikn Nuggit, "An episode made for Tik Tok in case the app gets banned for real"

"I missed."
-Pepé Le Pew, "For Scent-imental Reasons"

Animation, at least in America, feels a bit weird right now. Maybe a bit unhealthy, but not in a "sick and dying" kind of way, but in a "your diet is messed up" kind of way. My most recent review besides this one is Flow, a micro-budget independent movie from Latvia made with Blender, while The Day the Earth Blew Up is the latest iteration of major studio Warner Bros.'s most famous IP, featuring marketable characters older than World War II. And yet, somehow, the former review feels like an unnecessary noting of something everyone was already aware of anyway, while this review feels more like a spotlight on a small unknown that deserves a wider audience.

The Day the Earth Blew Up is being distributed by Ketchup Entertainment, a genuine independent distributor, despite the fact that Warner Bros. should in theory be more than capable of distributing its own movies. The movie did get an Academy Award qualifying run late last year, and seemed to be banking on actually getting at least a nomination to boost visibility, given the timing, but Ketchup didn't have the budget to put on a real campaign (Flow was not exactly in the same boat, as this was hardly its American distributor Janus Films' first Oscar rodeo). Once again, Warner Bros. itself could have easily campaigned it, and would probably have had no real problem bumping Inside Out 2 if they tried, but they, for whatever reason, didn't.

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie stars Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both voiced by Eric Bauza) in an adventure involving an apparent alien plot to conquer the Earth using chewing gum. It is directed by Peter Browngardt, and the movie is basically an extension of HBO Max's Looney Tunes Cartoons, which Browngardt developed. Somehow, this is the first completely new theatrical full length animated feature to use the Looney Tunes characters; previous theatrical releases were either compilations of previously produced theatrical shorts (such as 1979's The Bugs Bunny/Road-Runner Movie) or live action/animation "hybrids" (like the Space Jam movies).

After these historical messages we'll be right back

I feel like a brief history lesson is appropriate, because I am realizing that, as "millennial" born in the 1980s, I'm part of the last generation that remembers the Looney Tunes with a sense of nostalgia, a feeling which this movie is definitely meant to engender. And yet, I am also still too young to remember the Looney Tunes in their original, proper context, because I primarily experienced them on television, when they were originally created to be seen theatrically. The Looney Tunes, proper were exactly 1,000 (they didn't plan that, they just legitimately stopped production after the thousandth short) theatrical shorts produced from 1930 to 1969, originally by independent producer Leon Schlesinger before eventually being bought out by Warner Bros. outright. (Note that about half of them were technically "Merry Melodies"; originally this meant something, as the Looney Tunes shorts featured recurring characters while the Merry Melodies were mostly stand alone, as well as being in color when that became a thing, but by the 1950s, the label of "Looney Tune" or "Merry Melodie" was pretty much applied at random.) Theatrical shorts, which were played before the "feature" film, where a big thing during this time period, but changing theatrical movie-going habits meant this came to an end in the sixties.

Lots of animations studios closed during this time, and its known ominously as "The Dark Age of Animation", though it's also called, less pejoratively, the "television age". Most animation fans are aware of the "Dark Age of Disney", but may not realize that it wasn't just Disney's theatrical features (or their quality) this "age" is referring to. Warner Bros. was able to keep the Looney Tunes alive as a brand by repackaging their theatrical shorts as episodes of children's cartoons, and then selling them to television stations via syndication. The Looney Tunes were a staple of "Saturday morning cartoon" programming blocks, where they appealed to programmers for two main reasons; syndication was cheaper than making new stuff, and a lot of the new stuff was cheaply made and just not as well made as the intended-for-the-big-screen Looney Tunes.

But, times have changed, and viewing habits have as well, and the introduction of channels dedicated solely to cartoons and children's entertainment meant the Saturday morning cartoon block was a bit redundant. Certainly, channels like Cartoon Network began life heavily syndicating the Looney Tunes, but eventually, modern television animation started to improve dramatically, while the Looney Tunes themselves finally started to age. Modern remakes and updates of the Looney Tunes have appeared sporadically, to various levels of success, but the once ubiquitous characters just aren't, anymore.

I apologize for this impromptu history lesson in the middle of a review, as older animation fans are mostly already aware of this (and probably shaking their heads at my broad generalization of the story), while younger furries are probably wondering what this has to do with furry at all. If this section of this review has a point, it's possibly not to explain to my audience why the Looney Tunes were important, but to explain to myself why the Looney Tunes are no longer that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven. Look on my works, etc., etc. (As for the furry connection, well, they used a lot of funny animal characters, duh.)

And now back to the show

Anyway, The Day the Earth Blew Up is pretty good. It does a very good job of feeling like an old Looney Tunes short, while still feeling like a modern update. It feels most specifically like an homage to one of the Bob Clampett directed shorts during the 1940s, and while Clampett is not my favorite Looney Tunes director, and that isn't my favorite time period of the Looney Tunes production, its not like I hate either of them.

I actually did not like Browngardt's Looney Tunes Cartoons; I felt they were too gross. To be sure, Clampett was the closest any of the Looney Tunes directors got to really being gross, but his style seemed more "grotesque" than actually "gross". A minor distinction, to be sure, but a distinction nonetheless. (It doesn't help that one of Clampett's biggest acolytes was the odious John Kricfalusi, whose animation style did not make this distinction and was often just gross; ironically, for a guy who coined the phrase "Cal-Arts Style" to mock a fairly innocous group of trends, you can always spot a John K. style animator a mile away due to a rigid adherence to absolute hideousness.) Fortunately, Browngardt and company seem to have toned it down for this theatrical feature; the movie still features a lot of chewed up bubblegum, but it still feels way less icky.

Despite nostalgia being a big factor in the movie's appeal, the movie does not do the whole "look at all the cameos!" thing. Daffy, Porky and Petunia Pig are the only three classic Looney Tunes characters in the movie. They are also the only three anthropomorphic animals in the movie, and, no, this is neither acknowledged nor explained. Once again, this is early Clampett Daffy Duck, more wacky and screwball than the needy, jealous and fame-hungry Daffy of the later shorts. Porky Pig is not reduced to Daffy's sidekick. Both characters are co-leads, and feel like they get equivalently appropriate emotional arcs. Petunia (voiced by Candi Milo) is Porky's love interest (though, fun fact, in her original appearance in the shorts, she was introduced as Porky's sister!), but she gets her own interests and arc, and participates in the slapstick and gross out gags just as much as the boys.

The movie is also a parody of science fiction type stories, and works as an homage and loving send up to that kind of movie as much as it does to the classic Looney Tunes. Obviously, 1950s B-movies are parodied (Fred Tatasciore voices a wonderfully strong-jawed scientist of the type that only ever existed in those types of movies), but you also get homages to the wonderfully goopy 1980s remakes (so you get both The Thing and The Thing, The Blob and The Blob). Peter MacNicol (probably best known for his role in Ghostbusters II ... another pink goo movie!) plays the alien invader, whose full motivations for turning the entire Earth's population into mindless gum chewing zombies seems like a direct response to a common villain trope of the distinguished competition.

Though it isn't full of obvious Looney Tunes cameos, Wayne Knight does play the hapless mayor of the small town Daffy and Porky live in. Though Knight is a fairly prolific voice actor, it's nice to hear the voice of the Tune Squad's Stan Podolak in a new Looney Tunes movie. Space Jam still holds a rather contreversial place in the history of the Looney Tunes, but it's still a part of their history, and its nice it got acknowledged.

That about wraps it up, but a bit of bad news came up in the Looney Tunes world recently. It seems the streaming service Max, without much warning, dropped all of the original Looney Tunes shorts. First Warner Bros. all but refused to release this movie, now they've gotten rid of the original shorts on their own service. The stated reasoning, at least for the shorts' disappearance, is that the Max streaming service is moving away from "children's" programming and more towards "adult" and especially "family" audiences.

At my screening, there were only four other people. Ketchup just has not been able to get the word out, it seems. There was one other adult by himself, I'm assuming another animation fan. Then there was a group of three, apparently being a mother, a father and a young son.

There's a word for this kind of group of people.