The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie holds an important place in Looney Tunes history in multiple ways. It’s the first-ever theatrical, fully animated, feature-length Looney Tunes film (Past theatrical outings have been shorts, animation-live action hybrids, or feature-length compilations of (mostly) existing shorts). It’s a rare 2D-animated film, which is especially rare in theaters. In a very Looney Tunes twist, it’s also an underdog that persevered through anvil after anvil on the head and bounced back even higher.
The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is an absolute looney blast. Bring your friends who love to laugh. This lunacy begs to be seen on the big screen!
Whether you’ve never heard of the Looney Tunes or they’re old friends (Porky Pig just turned 90!), you’ll laugh so hard, you’ll spit out your gum! Not to mention that either way, you may be surprised by how much heart this movie has without sacrificing the humor.
In The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, Daffy Duck (Eric Bauza), Porky Pig (also Eric Bauza), and Petunia Pig (Candi Milo) team up to stop an alien invader (Peter MacNichol) who’s trying to blow up the Earth through mind-control bubblegum…
Perfect!
The fact that The Day the Earth Blew Up, directed by Pete Browngardt, has so much visual humor is why it has far more writers credited than you’d see in most films (There’s a reason why “Looney Tunes” has itself become a term to describe reality-smashing slapstick). Darrick Bachman, Pete Browngardt, Kevin Costello, Andrew Dickman, David Gemmill, Alex Kirwan, Ryan Kramer, Michael Ruocco, Jason Reicher, Johnny Ryan, and Eddie Trigueros are all credited as writers. Besides Bachman and Costello, all of them are also film animators in various capacities. The film, being driven by “looney” visuals, had these artists working and reworking sequences together and, in the process, writing the film.
The filmmakers are clearly very familiar with the Looney Tunes, using their historic strengths in new contexts. The animation and music work together seamlessly, enhancing each other. If you don’t know Daffy and Porky, you get to know them pretty quickly and spend enough time with them to care about them (I particularly enjoyed the early scene, which clearly shows their home divided between what Porky takes care of versus what Daffy does). If you’ve known Daffy and Porky your entire life, they’re recognizable as the duck and pig they’ve always been with an extra dimension to add depth specific to this story. Cultural influences both retro (the entire genre of a 1950s sci-fi alien invasion B-movie) and new (a fun social media gag) blend together. Exaggerated physical comedy matches with sharp, witty dialogue. (Plus, did I catch a sneaky callout to the classic “Duck Amuck” short? Very clever.) There’s even a mini-Looney Tunes short early in the film.
Speaking of metatextual animation gags: Farmer Jim (Fred Tatasciore). Full stop. Every single moment of his precious little time onscreen is itself a gag that has the unique effect of feeling like you’re laughing with the animators who are letting you in on a joke.
The Looney Tunes are slapstick machines, but anyone who’s screamed, “Wabbit Season! Duck Season!” knows that the twisting, turning dialogue puts critical cogs in that machine. They’ve always taken instantly well-defined characters and stuck them into different roles and genres. Their visuals are inextricably intertwined with music to add to the timing, pacing, and emotional beats. The Day the Earth Blew Up uses both recognizable Looney Tunes, uh, tunes (You could even call them “merry (“merrie”) melodies.”) that have been underscoring these characters’ antics for decades and surprisingly modern music that works just as well. (Kudos to Joshua Moshier for wonderfully epic music.) If you’re at all concerned about modern melodies in Looney Tunes, don’t worry: it’s not the end of the world as we know it. You’ll feel fine.
I cannot emphasize enough how the dialogue is just as clever as the slapstick. From using the label “looney” as a significant story element to the few side characters shining in their brief moments (including a hysterically sarcastic floor manager (Andrew Kishino) and Waitress Maude, charmingly voiced by Ruth Clampett, daughter of legendary Looney Tunes director Bob Clampett), to the very title of the film…I’ll stop there because reading them is no match for hearing them.
It’s impressive how focused the script is. The film has very few characters (much like the Looney Tunes shorts), allowing us to really spend time with them and get to know them. This limited cast and focus make it feel all the more isolating when the bubblegum-brained zombies start dragging themselves around every corner. This small cast is juxtaposed with stakes and a story that are grand in scale. And yet, it’s never tiring or boring sticking with our main trio.
Besides Daffy and Porky, Petunia Pig is our third protagonist in this trio. We have so many Looney Tunes characters: so many Looney personalities and extremely diverse species (including some one-of-a-kind varieties), all creating a wide rainbow of colorful characters with almost nothing in common. And yet, nearly all of them have one particular thing in common… they’re male. (Tweety Bird is male.) As far as female characters, there’s Lola Bunny (who didn’t hop in until 1996), Granny, Witch Hazel (or Witch Lezah), Petunia Pig, Penelope Pussycat, Pussyfoot…Tina Russo…Queen Tyr’ahnee…at this point, you may have to start checking online lists to find others, if you haven’t already, and debating what counts as a “Looney Tunes character.” Two on that list alone were exclusive to a specific Looney Tunes TV show (I’d personally love to see them again). Compared to the dozens of dudes we can rattle off just off the tops of our heads and only stop when we need to breathe, that’s not a lot.
I give major props to the filmmakers for not only including Petunia––– who, even amongst the already-less-prominent female Looney Tunes, is one of the more obscure––– but also giving her a looney personality to stand out from Porky and Daffy…which, when combined with them, also makes her fit in with them.
Credit to Candi Milo for giving Petunia a unique, cartoony voice that goes seamlessly with Porky and Daffy. Speaking of, credit to Eric Bauza for voicing both of the latter characters. Not only does each have their distinctive voice, but if you didn’t know they were both voiced by Bauza, you’d be hard-pressed to realize it on your own and, In a hilariously messed-up way, we also discover that one specific distinctive voice has an origin.
Not only was The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie not originally supposed to break the aforementioned big-screen barriers, but we almost didn’t get to see it at all.
The Day the Earth Blew Up was originally going to be distributed by Warner Bros. Animation to stream on Max (then HBO Max) and air on TV on Cartoon Network’s “ACME Night” block. Mid-production, WarnerMedia (Warner Bros.’ parent company) merged with Discovery, Inc. The film finished without being scrapped, but the new Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. would no longer distribute the film. The filmmakers got permission to shop it around to other companies. First, GFM Animation picked it up for some international (non-U.S.) distribution. After the film screened at the 2024 Annecy International Animation Film Festival to find a domestic distributor, Ketchup Entertainment picked it up for U.S. distribution. Other companies have since picked it up for other countries. This gap between GFM and Ketchup picking it up also accounts for why The Day the Earth Blew Up has been blowing up theaters across Earth since 2024 before finally opening in the U.S. on March 14th, 2025.
I am not unbiased. Whether because of my history with the Looney Tunes, knowing the movie’s history of fighting to get finished and released, or some combination thereof, it wouldn’t take much for me to like The Day the Earth Blew Up. I’m a lifelong Looney Tunes fan, especially Daffy Duck. I have an accidental collection of a frankly absurd number of Daffy Duck shirts…and when a shirt has multiple Looney Tunes on it, Daffy has to be one of them. I’ve performed with the Looney Tunes in live shows. I can and will talk your ear off about how Duck Dodgers is extremely underrated and probably sing the (extended) theme song. And, of course, as a Svengoolie fan, I’ve seen more than my fair share of the retro science fiction movies with which this Looney Tunes adventure splices its DNA.
Let’s be honest: anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Looney Tunes will have some bias going into The Day the Earth Blew Up. When anything endures for generations, everyone has their own unique experiences with it, their own feelings about it, and their own idea of what it is and should be. This is especially true because, in order to endure, it has to evolve in some way over time. The Looney Tunes have indeed done a bit of almost everything…with one of the surprising exceptions being a feature-length, fully-animated adventure on the big screen. Maybe you saw the original Looney Tunes shorts in theaters and understood all of the cultural and pop cultural references. Maybe you saw them on TV or streaming, and their slapstick caught your eye (hopefully not literally). Maybe you’ve only seen the Looney Tunes play basketball…twice. (Those films made an impact on a lot of people…)
When Daffy, Porky, and Petunia, at last, come face-to-face with the snarky Invader (Peter MacNicol) and bumbling Scientist (Fred Tatasciore), the humor escalates further, and the story comes to a head as their plot lines collide.
Comedy is an effective way to endear characters to the audience. Whether the character in question is making the jokes, the butt of the joke, or both, comedy, when used strategically, means that gut punches––– or gut anvils––– hit that much harder.
In fact, the Looney Tunes are the perfect example of this writ large. The original shorts are often seven-ish minutes long and solely focused on every kind of comedy, from slapstick to rapid-fire wordplay. Not only that, but so much of that comedy comes from these characters trying to murder each other with the most mean-spirited quips. Yet, it’s handled so deftly that we not only don’t take the hits seriously but root for and fall in love with our favorite characters. Daffy Duck’s ultimate underdog status has been so solidified over the course of so many shorts that when he vents to Bugs Bunny in Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) about his bottom-of-the-barrel status, you feel the history behind it. When Wile E. Coyote sues ACME for their decades of defective products, you wish negotiations to buy the film would work out so you can see how the cartoony court rules on the looney lawsuit.
And apparently, so do the distributors of the Terrifier movies.
And when Daffy Duck and Porky Pig finally have a big, emotional beat we’ve felt building up for the film’s entire runtime, we feel for them both.
We know them. We’ve seen them win. We’ve seen them lose. We’ve laughed with them. We’ve laughed at them. We’ve seen them kill people in the audience and ask if there’s a doctor in the house…and laughed (I am very, very happy to see that style of joke lives on…another reason to see it in theaters where it will play even stronger).
Going from straight-to-streaming, to almost getting scrapped mid-production (multiple times), to not having a distributor…to a worldwide theatrical release is a pretty big statement about this film, the Looney Tunes in general, and those who worked on the film. Those who worked on the film believed in it and their work enough to keep putting it out there to get a non-Warner Bros. distributor for one of (if not the) most famous Warner Bros.-original franchises. The Looney Tunes are still a beloved brand that spans generations, hence why distributors the world over picked it up and why the cast and crew put such love into it that you can see, hear, and feel throughout the film. This film, being such a tribute to the Looney Tunes characters, style, and history while simultaneously keeping it as fresh as it has always been, walks that tightrope because of the Looney Tunes’ influence on generations of animation and comedy.
Don’t miss this on the big screen.
…Oh, and stay through the credits because…
That’s not all, folks!
