The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie (2025) Ketchup Entertainment/Comedy-Sci-Fi-Adventure RT: 91 minutes Rated PG (cartoon violence/action and rude/suggestive humor) Director: Pete Browngardt Screenplay: Darrick Bachman, Peter Browngardt, Kevin Costello, Andrew Dickman, David Gemmill, Alex Kirwan, Ryan Kramer, Jason Reicher, Michael Ruocco, Johnny Ryan and Eddie Trigueros Music: Joshua Moshier Release date: March 14, 2025 (US) Cast: Eric Bauza, Candi Milo, Peter MacNicol, Fred Tatasciore, Laraine Newman, Wayne Knight.
Rating: ***
“I’m going to blow up the Earth.”
If you know your Looney Tunes, you know exactly who said it. It’s presumably where they got the title The Day the Earth Blew Up. Sadly, Marvin the Martian is nowhere in sight in this latest feature-length film starring the Looney Tunes characters most (if not all) of us grew up watching. Well, two of them anyway. This particular outing features only Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. All the others, including Marvin, are MIA. Bugs Bunny doesn’t even put in an appearance.
And now for a few facts about The Day the Earth Blew Up. It is the first fully animated Looney Tunes movie based on original material. At no point do the animated characters share the screen with live actors or basketball players. It’s also the first Looney Tunes movie NOT to be released by Warner Bros. in America. They retained international rights while indie company Ketchup Entertainment took over domestic distribution. Although eleven writers are credited, only one of them (Darrick Bachman) actually worked on the script. The others are storyboard artists who received credit as writers. Now you know.
Planet Earth is under threat of an alien invasion. It can only be saved by the unlikeliest of heroes, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck (both voiced by Eric Bauza). For the purposes of The Day the Earth Blew Up, they are adoptive siblings who were brought up by the kindly Farmer Jim (Tatasciore, Hit-Monkey). Porky is the more rational of the two while Daffy has a tendency to go…. well, daffy. He’s like a hyperactive child who just consumed a whole box of Nerds and a super-size Coke.
Their involvement with the approaching catastrophe begins when they fail their yearly house inspection due to a huge gaping hole in the roof. It was caused when a meteor crashed through it the night before leaving behind traces of mysterious green goo. The inspector (Newman, SNL), who doesn’t like them very much, gives them just ten days to repair it before she has their home condemned. That’s going to take money they don’t have and quite possibly never will if Daffy keeps getting them fired from every job they get.
One day, they meet Petunia Pig (Milo) in a dinner. A scientist at the local Goody Gum factory, she and Porky immediately hit it off. She offers to help them get jobs at her workplace. It’s during their first shift that Daffy discovers the alien plot to turn everybody into zombies. A scientist (Tatasciore), acting on behalf of the alien invader (MacNicol, Ghostbusters II), dumps some of the green goo into the gum supply. A new flavor is about to be launched which means everybody will be chewing the tainted gum. When they do, they’ll turn into mindless zombies.
Daffy tries to warn everybody, but nobody believes him, not even Porky who thinks it’s just another one of his wild conspiracy theories. Petunia confirms it to be true and the threesome bands together to fight the extra-terrestrial villain.
Peter Browngardt, developer of the HBO Max series Looney Tunes Cartoons, effectively recaptures the anarchic spirit of the original cartoon shorts in The Day the Earth Blew Up. It’s by far the best of the Looney Tunes movies not that the bar is very high with the two Space Jams and Back in Action. I love that he went with traditional 2D animation rather than CGI. The LT gang should only ever be rendered as hand-drawn characters. It gives the material a retro feel. It makes it stand out in a field jammed with generic, non-Pixar movies that kids won’t even remember a week after the fact (if that).
I’m not saying The Day the Earth Blew Up is the greatest animated movie ever made. It is, however, quite good. It’s funny, colorful and lively. Surprisingly, it also has heart. The scene where their adoptive dad passes on is sad. The bond between Porky and Daffy, although tested more than once, is sweet. This is rather unusual because warmth and feelings were never really the point of Looney Tunes. The characters were absurdist presences, personifications of chaos. That’s their primary appeal. It was true 80-odd years ago and it’s still true today.
