It’s good to have them back. After the Coyote vs. Acme debacle, we finally get some of the Looney Tunes back on the big screen again. The Day the Earth Blew Up is a welcome reboot, seeing if Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and some others, can translate to the modern era. Spoiler Alert: thethethethethetheat’s not all folks for the Tunes, and hopefully, it’s the restart of something awesome for a generation.
This iteration of Daffy and Porky (both voiced by Eric Bauza) were adopted and raised by Farmer Jim (Fred Tatasciore), and happily live as roommates in their childhood home. Until this day, where they fail their home inspection because the roof of their house was destroyed. Figuring out who destroyed their house sets the pair on a path to global problems, starting with that green goo all over their house, and who/what could have caused that.
12 writers worked on this movie, what I assume is all the people invested in making this adventure succeed. Nostalgically, it’s great to see Daffy and Porky again, that rock solid foundation holding the movie together. Despite Bugs Bunny getting all the glory, Daffy is the straw that stirs a Looney Tunes drink: pure and utter chaos in the most fun ways. The new characters they bring in are fun too: Porky’s love interest Petunia (Candi Milo) is just as wacky and weird as the “male” tunes, and the Invader (Peter MacNicol) is the right mixture of scary and stupid like Danny DeVito in Space Jam.
But the jokes have to carry the day for The Day the Earth Blew Up to work. Fortunately, 12 writers untethered to reality means the silly ideas flow early and often. Because the rules of reality don’t apply here, we’re at the whims of boundless imagination, meaning there’s more than a few twists and turns in this story and comedic sensibilities of the film that are wonderfully surprising but perfect for the target audience of a Looney Tunes movie. The base of most of the jokes is slapstick, but there’s plenty of time for clever wordplay, Muppets level self awareness, and even some modern critiques, the best of which involves Daffy and Porky Pig as influencers, a bit they should bring back over and over again. I laughed out loud more than a few times, something I notice because of the frequency of the laughter, a testament to the Looney Tunes picking up where they left off since my childhood.
Here’s hoping a bunch of kids check this one out. And if we’re lucky, we’ll get more and more of these feature films. Who knows? Maybe Ketchup entertainment can pull Coyote vs. Acme from the depths of cartoon hell and get them to the big screen where everyone but David Zaslav wants them to be! Meep meep! Get a movie on it Ketchup!