The Day the Earth Blew Up
Directed by Pete Browngardt
Written by Pete Browngardt, Darrick Bachman, Kevin Costello, Andrew Dickman, David Gemmill, Alex Kirman, Ryan Kramer, Jason Reicher, Michael Ruocco, Johnny Ryan, and Eddie Trigueros
Starring Eric Bauza, Candi Milo, Peter MacNicol
Rated PG
Runtime: 1 hour and 31 minutes
In theaters March 14

by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor

I mentioned in my article on How to Start Watching Daffy Duck and Porky Pig that it is difficult to estimate the influence the impact Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies has had on US film and pop culture. Despite this impact, more recent attempts to resurrect the franchise have been lackluster at best and offensive at worst—2021’s Space Jam: A New Legacy stands out particularly for its status as a one-hour-and-fifty-five-minute ad for Warner Bros. IP—and, unfortunately, The Day the Earth Blew Up falls into the former category.

The film re-introduces an iconic Looney Tunes duo—Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both voiced by Eric Bauza)—by creating a backstory for their relationship: Daffy and Porky were adopted and raised as brothers by Farmer Jim (Fred Tatasciore), who is animated in an American Regionalist style in an admittedly a deeply funny contrast to the world of the Tunes, who tells them to always stick together and to look after their house before ascending to the heavens a la Jesus. Cut to several years later: the house is in shambles, and Porky and Daffy need to get a job to pay for repairs or else face eviction by their neighborhood HOA. After several failed attempts, they find the perfect job at a local bubblegum factory along with flavor scientist and Porky’s crush Petunia Pig (Candi Milo). However, Earth is under threat by the mysterious alien The Invader (Peter MacNichol), who seeks to control the planet’s population using bubblegum. Uncovering the plot and defending the Earth will test the brothers’ skills and loyalty to one another.

This is Director Peter Browngardt’s full-length feature directorial debut, but he has a long history in animation in general and Looney Tunes in particular. He is responsible for the revival of Looney Tunes at Warner Bros. in the form of Looney Tunes Cartoons, an ongoing TV series that premiered in 2020. Bauza, Tatasciore, and Milo all voice various characters on the show, so it makes sense to think of The Day the Earth Blew Up as a continuation of those versions of the characters. The film is the first Looney Tunes feature length fully animated film to receive a theatrical release, although it is distributed by Ketchup Entertainment and not by Warner Bros., who dropped the film from its release schedule a few months after a certain CEO took over the studio.

On paper, The Day the Earth Blew Up sounds like a good idea. Browngardt and the writers—eight of them—clearly love Looney Tunes, and the ‘50s sci-fi B movie conceit is a great pairing with the cartoonish silliness tone of the franchise, evident from Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century, the successful 1953 parody of TV adventure serial Buck Rogers and the 25th Century. The Daffy and Porky pairing as odd couple brothers has the potential for comedic conflict in the vein of The Great Muppet Caper’s Kermit and Fozzy Bear as twins gag. Porky slowly losing his patience with the more impulsive Daffy over the course of the film does feel like a natural development from their duo adventures in the shorts—Looney Tunes isn’t a place normally associated with discussions about personal boundaries and codependency, but a full length film might provide an opportunity to actually tease out the character dynamics that the shorts loved to play with.

Despite all of this, The Day the Earth Blew Up fails at the basic expectation of Looney Tunes films: it simply isn’t that funny. Sure, there is a lot of slapstick and cartoon violence, staples of the franchise, but the film doesn’t deploy it with any seeming purpose or the clever subversion that classic Looney Tunes revels in.

Take Duck Dodgers, the short that The Day The Earth Blew Up is drawing on, for an example. Daffy as Duck Dodgers (Mel Blanc) and Porky as Eager Young Space Cadet (Mel Blanc) become embroiled in a territorial dispute over Planet X with Marvin the Martian (Mel Blanc). In their first encounter, Daffy scoffs when Marvin pulls an A-1 Disintegrating Pistol on him, breaking the fourth wall to remark to the audience, “Little does he realize that I have on my disintegration proof vest.” When Marvin shoots him, Daffy disintegrates, leaving only the vest intact. Although the joke involves violence to deliver the punchline, the set up hinges both Daffy and the audience’s expectations that a vest designed to protect its wearer from disintegration will do so. The fact that it doesn’t is a subversion of the expected narrative. In many ways, Daffy as Dodgers Himself is a classic inversion of the heroic space adventurer archetype in that the villain isn’t really the one who defeats him: he defeats himself via self-sabotage.

In contrast, the Daffy of The Day the Earth Blew Up seems like a simplified version of the character—manic, zany, with way too much self-confidence—but there is nothing else there. He seems to get frustrated and exasperated because that’s what Daffy is supposed to do; he doesn’t really seem emotionally invested in saving the house or the world. The slapstick is used for the sake of slapstick, disrupting without establishing something to disrupt. There is no manipulation of the audience and character perspective, no mistaken identities or incomplete pictures, just pratfalls and explosions and goop. It’s a movie of punchlines with little to no set up.

The film also seems to have simplified Porky in a way that undermines the humor of the character: in Duck Dodgers, Porky’s character Eager Young Space Cadet is elevated because, although he plays the role of a meek and respectful sidekick to Daffy, he is actually the hero of the short. He is the only who tells Daffy the easiest way to find Planet X (a plan that Daffy immediately takes credit for despite presenting a much more complex and unnecessarily circuitous route moments earlier), the one to reintegrate Daffy after he is disintegrated, and the one to hand Marvin a stick of dynamite disguised as a birthday present. He does it all with a sly smile, indicating that his act of sweet compliance is just that, an act.

Porky in the film has none of this complexity, instead taking the role of the much put upon brother who doesn’t seem to have any sense of his own identity until near the end of the film. This lack of slyness reduces the humor of the character to that of Porky’s stutter. In fact, classic Looney Tunes slyness is missing from the film as a whole: the filmmakers seem to have mistaken self-referential winking for the tongue-in-cheek humor of the original shorts. Daffy at one point actually says, “It’s time for this duck to go amuck,” which is the most groan-worthy meta reference played for audience laughs I’ve heard in a long time and also entirely misses the point of the original Duck Amuck short.

There isn’t even really a decent satire of ‘50s sci-fi invasion films here, which seems like it is going through the motions for the sake of jokes rather than actual narrative homage. Films like The Night of the Zoopocalypse (2025) and The Shape of Water (2017) demonstrate love for this genre better than The Day the Earth Blew Up does. Weirdly, this film would have benefited from a reappearance of Marvin the Martian as either the prime or secondary villain as he and Daffy have a lot of antagonistic chemistry. Instead, The Invader is an extremely one note villain that doesn’t even really interact with the main characters until late in the film. There are no sparks from their clash, none of that gleeful back-and-forth between an unstoppable force and an immovable object that make so many of the shorts engrossing.

The Day the Earth Blew Up is missing that element of Looney Tunes that made the original shorts so attractive to audiences. Looney Tunes, for better or worse, display the human id in all its violent and disorderly complexity. At their best, the shorts push the narratives humans construct to contain the chaos of the universe to their breaking point, revealing their inherent fragility and allowing us to laugh at ourselves. They are cathartic in their silliness and surprising in their deceptive simplicity. It is unclear to me whether these elements can in fact be sustained over the length of a full length feature film without the addition of other elements, such as the live action Michael Jordan storyline in 1996’s Space Jam. By comparison, The Day the Earth Blew Up is just an echo, and it’s disappointing that this is the movie we got instead of the fully completed and ready for theatrical release Coyote vs. Acme.

Support MovieJawn Staff

–

Support MovieJawn Staff –

Support Tessa Swehla

With the death of so much print media and meaningful journalism, it is important now more than ever to support the writers and outlets you love.
If you enjoyed this article, show your support by donating to our writer. All proceeds go directly to the writer. Recommended donation is $5.