The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (2024)
As a lifelong Looney Tunes fan, I am delighted by the existence of this movie and depressed by the circumstances surrounding its release.
The movie:
It took over 90 years for the Looney Tunes to get their own full-length, fully animated feature. This time they don’t have to share the spotlight with human actors, brand/franchise promotions, or human non-actor athletes. It also smartly chooses to narrow its focus down to Daffy and Porky (both voiced by Eric Bauza). The creators resist the urge to stuff in random cameos by the wider Looney Tunes cast or force them into plot roles just to give them some screen time. It references or recreates some beats from some famous old shorts (anyone who loved the old Tunes is going to pop for one particular music cue), but it doesn’t feel slavish to them and creates plenty of new gags. But “new” doesn’t mean they are just chasing current references or modern animated movie trends. If you saw one of the few commercials for this, you might have been concerned about the twerking gag, but that is one of maybe 2 or 3 noticeably contemporary references in the movie (so of course they centered it in the trailer). There are exactly two pop song drops on the soundtrack, using songs that are nearly 30 and 40 years old respectively, one used for humor, one for action accompaniment, and neither for gratuitous dance scenes. Both of them made me smile.
The film moves through various scenarios that could each be standalone shorts, which keeps things from dragging or getting too repetitive. Yet they flow together into a larger story in a way that doesn’t feel like you just watched a marathon of individual cartoons. Daffy and Porky's traits are toned down a little to allow them carry a story beyond 8 minutes of chaos, but they still feel recognizable. The movie does give them and their relationship an emotional heart, but I appreciated that it only hit this beat like 3 times towards the end (and the first time it turns into a funny gag/deus ex machina). I have enjoyed the recent Looney Tunes Cartoons series that this spun out of, but it is great seeing that same team work with a bigger budget. At $15 million this still has a lower budget than many animated features, but there is a noticeable leap in animation quality and ambition here compared to the series.
The simple but snowballing set up finds Porky and Daffy trying to save their house by getting jobs and eventually running into a planet-wide scheme by an alien (Peter MacNicol, great) that lets it riff on 1950s scif-i movies and beyond. The biggest addition to Looney Tunes “canon” (if there is such a thing) is showing that Daffy and Porky were raised together since they were babies by Farmer Jim. This is an important factor in the plot and the emotional beats I mentioned (Farmer Jim gives them the house and tells them to stick together) so it could have felt forced or perfunctory, but it is loaded with great laughs. I want a whole cartoon based on the one second image of angsty teen Daffy and Porky. The casually surreal weirdness surrounding new character Farmer Jim is one of my favorite parts of the movie. The way the character is depicted feels like an evolution of animation gags from director Pete Browngardt’s cartoon Uncle Grandpa. Then I thought further back to the detailed painted cutaways in Ren & Stimpy. Then I thought about it some more, and realized that actually R & S was probably riffing on Looney Tunes to begin with, although the painted images were much rarer in Looney Tunes (I can recall at least one, a close up of Bug’s face when the gremlin goes inside his ear in “Falling Hare”).
This is 90 minutes of pure joy and entertainment. Like many feature-length comedies, it does feel front-loaded with the best jokes in the first act, but it never went more than a few minutes without getting a laugh out of me. There was exactly one point where I was just starting to feel a little restless with the plot/runtime, but a few seconds later it changed course and I was back onboard til the credits rolled. Push the button and pull the crank!
The circumstances:
My wife and I saw this in an otherwise empty theater. I joked that if not for my deep respect for Looney Tunes, we could have had sex in the theater. Sadly, the company that owns the Looney Tunes franchise does not hold that same level of respect, and they seem to be trying to f**k it anywhere they can. This movie came out of the Max streaming revival series Looney Tunes Cartoons, where Browngardt and company created over 200 new shorts that were grouped into 90+ episodes. That show was a delightful return to old school-style Looney Tunes after many decades of trying (and generally failing) to reformat or reimagine the characters for new shows. It started streaming in 2020, the last episodes came out in 2023. I thought they were good fun, and have spent years telling people about them online and IRL. Here’s the problem: not a single person I told about the show had ever heard of it before that! There was barely any promotion/advertising when it first started, zero as it continued, it never seems to be promoted even within the Max app, and as far as I know they never bothered airing it on Cartoon Network to increase visibility. The only coverage I remember was internet headline grabbers about them taking Elmer Fudd’s gun away out of sensitivity to the modern gun violence epidemic. Sadly, that seemed to turn off some old fans from ever trying it. I wish the creators could have countered by saying “Don’t worry, we are still keeping all the other classic cartoon violence and actually pushing it…” accompanied by images from the show like Daffy having his face brutalized by a cactus to establish its bona fides. Then WB funded this movie from the same people with the idea that it would be direct-to-streaming. After the merger with Discovery, the new conglomerate had zero interest in this completed film and began trying to sell it. YEARS after it was completed, it has finally seen the light of day, being distributed by Ketchup Entertainment. That meant very little promotion, so we are back to the same situation as the new streaming series. I spoke to a few co-workers, and NONE of them knew this movie existed and were even more surprised to learn it was in theaters. Yet all of them thought it sounded fun, and were fans of the old school Looney Tunes. One of them even has a young child that she took to see Dog Man in theaters. They know there is a new live action Snow White that they have no interest in, but they had no idea the Looney Tunes movie existed.
Guess what, Warner Brothers? People of all ages still like the Looney Tunes! I nearly punched my computer when I read that Max was getting rid of ALL the classic Looney Tunes shorts, and their reasoning was they wanted to “focus on family and adult entertainment.” Looney Tunes are the DEFINITION of family entertainment, the shorts were made to air before movies back in the day for children and adults alike! The high level of quality of those original shorts kept the characters popular through decades without new cartoons and decades of failed attempts to reimagine or reformat the characters. I saw them in syndication in the 90s and became a fan as a small child and became a lifelong fan, watching them with my mom who also loved them. This is what the companies don’t understand. They just want to push out new content quickly for whatever franchise is “hot” right now, without the understanding that you need to create something that is really good or has staying power to create fans in the first place. People are only going to consume so much mediocre content before they lose interest, even if it is a character or franchise they like. This movie might not have blown the roof off the box office, but it would have renewed the interest of some old fans and created new ones. Those kids have decades ahead of them to watch new shows and movies, rediscover old ones, and buy merchandise. Long-tail interest and profits don’t mean a thing to executives trying to cut costs in the short term so they can sell the properties off or start yet another merger before leaving their jobs with a golden parachute to let the next exec sort through the wreckage. I know they have no interest or value in actual creativity and quality, but even from a business perspective they are damaging long term profits and success for short term bonuses.
Beyond the Warner/Discovery fustercluck, the trailers before this movie also made me depressed about the wider world of kids and family animation. First there was a preview for Elio, the next Pixar movie. I generally think Pixar movies are fine but overrated, but this one looks like it was assembled from the parts of previous hits. Even Disney/Pixar fans online have been more critical of their output in the last few years, and it seems the company’s response has been to greenlight more sequels and make new movies that feel just like the old ones. Incredible animation quality on a huge budget with completely generic designs and familiar humor and plots, what a waste. Next up, The King of Kings, a computer animated version of Charles Dickens’ version of the Bible’s version of the story of Jesus Christ. This one comes from Angel Studios, the financially successful and creatively bankrupt distributor that puts out “Christian” movies that are guaranteed to make money selling blocks of tickets to churches, so quality doesn’t matter. I have seen animated versions of Jesus before that seemed respectful or reverent, but something about the ugly character designs and cheap CG animation make this seem extra wrong. For a brief moment I was happy the theater for Looney Tunes was empty, because I laughed out loud at the sight of Bratz-doll Jesus crucified with the main child character weeping in front of him. The final trailer was for Sneaks, a CG movie about anthropomorphic shoes. WTF? It immediately made me remember a joke from The Simpsons where they see a trailer for “Cards,” a CG movie about anthropomorphic playing cards full of bad puns and hacky references. I just looked it up, that gag is now TWENTY YEARS OLD, and yet here is a brand new movie that is exactly as lazy and stupid as the parody movie. When the title of the movie came up at the end of the trailer, my wife and I both instinctively said “Sneaks!” out loud in the same tone as South Park’s fake Rob Schnieder trailers. Then my wife asked how you make a whole movie about shoes. I said easy, you just write like 45 pages of bad shoe puns and generic story beats from hundreds of other movies, then write “insert dancing or singing to popular song” and “unnecessary chase sequence” for the other half of the script. Easy peasy, someone give me millions of dollars please.
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