As Looney As It Gets: “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie”

The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (Peter Browngardt, 2024) 3½ out of 5 stars

The first feature-length Looney Tunes movie promises a nostalgic good time and delivers on that promise. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie gives us Daffy Duck and Porky Pig—with Petunia Pig added in for good measure—on a wild ride of an adventure involving chewing gum, a would-be alien overlord, and zombies. If the jokes are sometimes uneven, the animation is top-notch. This is the good stuff we remember, and there’s more of it.

The modern voice of Daffy and Porky (and others), Eric Bauza returns for the movie and brings the mayhem, lisps and stutters we expect from the characters. Another Looney Tunes veteran, Candi Milo, voices Petunia, and Peter MacNicol (of long-ago Ally McBeal fame) is the alien invader. Director Peter Browngardt graduates from shorts to features and oversees a crack team of animators who bring their art and talent to bear in a celebration of hand-drawn 2D images. They don’t make ‘em like they used to? Incorrect. They sure do.

The plot centers on the lifelong friendship between Daffy and Porky, adopted as babes by Farmer Jim and raised in harmony (and a lot of chaos). Once Jim passes, they continue living together, even as the world around them turns from rural to suburban and their house slides into disrepair. When the local neighborhood rep comes to scold and warn that they must fix the place, they realize that money is short and a job would be in good order.

One reason why their house is such a mess is because there’s a great big hole in the roof, courtesy of a meteor (or was it?) that came crashing through in the prologue. That space object leaks green, fluorescent goo, which Daffy sees again when they later land a gig at the local chewing-gum factory (courtesy of Petunia, a flavor scientist there). The oozing substance is in the hands of another scientist who has been turned into something of a zombie, answering instructions from an orbiting UFO, controlled by an extraterrestrial with a seemingly dastardly plan to take over the planet.

What ensues is, indeed, as loony as it gets. Complementing the animation is the score and sound design, including the use of a theremin (or what sounds like it), that electronic musical instrument used throughout the alien-invasion movies that proliferated in the 1950s. The antics are zany, the humor (mostly) inventive, and the outcome perhaps never in doubt but with nevertheless plenty of surprises in store. The Earth may not actually blow up, but plenty of other things do. Kablooey!

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.