The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
Rating: PG
Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes
Stars: Eric Bauza, Candi Milo
Director/Co-Writer: Peter Browngardt
Gather ye round, children, and I’ll tell you of a time when animated films were hand-drawn — yes, that’s right, drawn — frame by frame. It took scores of artists slaving away over easels, like Medieval monks transcribing scripture, to create seven minutes of hand-made fantasy.
Those of us who grew up lying on the TV room floor soaking in the calibrated craziness of Warner Bros.’ Bugs Bunny, the friendly formula of Terrytoons’ Mighty Mouse, or the lush but less-than-hilarious labors of MGM’s Tom and Jerry, never quite got the fact that these cartoons were made in the first place for the sprawling screen of a movie theater. Reduced to the 25-inch home tube, they seemed like, at best, minor miracles.
Now, nearly 60 years after Warner Bros. shuttered their classic animation studio, hand-made animation makes a triumphant, wacked-out comeback with The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, starring none other than Porky Pig and Daffy Duck.
What’s more, hard as it may be to believe, this marks the first full-length, fully animated Looney Tunes feature in their 96-odd-year history.
And guess what? It’s been worth waiting for.
Fans know that, back in the day, the Looney Tunes gang dabbled in science fiction regularly. So, it’s no surprise that this outing involves space aliens, mad scientists, and elaborate toons-versus-monsters set pieces. This time out, Porky and Daffy find themselves working at a candy factory (the first jobs of their toonful lives) that, unbeknownst to them, has become the focus of an alien being who has gummed up the bubble gum works with a chemical that turns everyone who chews it into dead-eyed, gaped-mouth zombies.
Enlisting the help of an ingenious gum flavoring technician played by Petunia Pig (did I just say “played by…?”) the pair set to work saving the world while simultaneously managing to destroy just about everything in sight.
It’s important to note that this is no re-imagining of the classic Warner Bros. characters. In fact, if I were to guess, the design and behavior of Porky and Daffy here is based right on the pair’s sweet spot: the mid-1940s, when animator Robert Clampett paired the duo to manically magical effect in shorts like “Tick Tock Tuckered” and “Baby Bottleneck” —in which they also work in a factory, and even wear the same billed caps. (As if to eliminate any doubt, early on the boys duck into The Clampett Diner where they are served by a woman who, if you consult the end credits, is voiced by Robert Clampett’s daughter, Ruth.)
Everyone knows the 1940s were a period of High Looney Tune Art. Porky had long since outgrown the childlike persona of his early films, and Daffy had not yet morphed into the always-angry foil that Chuck Jones seemed to favor. Clampett cast them as mismatched friends, with Porky perpetually perplexed by Daffy’s self-aware daffiness.
Director Peter Browngardt has been making short TV Looney Toons episodes for some time now, so he knows his way around the classic characters. He also senses that while you can make a breakneck assembly line gag or breathless chase pretty much fill a seven-minute short, you need to pace yourself to go a full 90 minutes. So, between raucous rampages, we get a handful of nicely subdued moments during which Daffy and Porky (and sometimes Porky and Petunia) take a moment to bond and banter. But these aren’t throwaway moments: The personality animation here is so gloriously rendered we can almost read the characters paint-and-penciled minds.
Die-hard ’Tooners will always insist there is no voice artist who will ever match the immortal Mel Blanc, who enlivened virtually every Warner Bros. cartoon during its Golden Era. But give props to Eric Bauza, who here voices both Daffy, with his saliva-spewing lisp, and Porky, with the endearing stutter that is less an impediment than a benign speech pattern (in a sweet twist, Porky is delighted to discover that Petunia, when excited, has a stutter of her own).
Usually, the presence of a team of 15 writers would sound alarm bells for any movie project. Here, though, the gags — visual, verbal, and sometimes subliminal — flow in a torrent that could only have been pumped out by a tag team of cartoon veterans whose careers have crossed paths not just at Warner’s, but also at Disney and DreamWorks.
Will Earth really get blown up? Will Porky and Daffy stop stepping on each other’s webbed and cloven feet? Will Porky and Petunia find Hog Heaven?
Rest assured, everything works out in a terrifically toony way. And you’ll feel a pang of parting sadness when you finally realize th-th-th-That’s All, Folks.
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