The Day The Earth Blew Up Finally Brings The Looney Tunes Out of Limbo
That's not all, folks!
In The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig’s home gets totally, utterly destroyed by an alien invasion. It feels like a weirdly metatextual moment, even for a franchise known for frequently shattering the fourth wall. It’s been widely publicized that the Looney Tunes’ longtime home at Warner Bros. has been slowly and systematically ... well, not quite “destroyed,” but certainly not given foundational support. There’s a reason that The Day The Earth Blew Up is being released in theaters this week by Ketchup Entertainment, which acquired the distribution rights from Warner Bros. after the film had been kept in limbo for more than three years. The Looney Tunes, once such a pillar of the studio that Bugs Bunny was an integral part of the Warner Bros. logo, could no longer reliably call Warner their home.
Since 2022, current Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaszlav has been slashing budgets across all brands — and none have taken a harder hit than animation. But it was still shocking to see a legacy franchise like Looney Tunes take a beating, with hundreds of classic shorts like Duck Amuck quietly taken off the Max streaming service (before being added back on after outcry), and project after project getting canceled. The worst part came when fully completed feature films like The Day the Earth Blew Up and Coyote vs. Acme got unceremoniously canned — the former to apparently appease stockholders, the latter for a tax write-off. But no matter how many cartoonishly big mallets to the head the Looney Tunes might take, they’ll always come crawling back — and The Day the Earth Blew Up is perfect, wildly entertaining, proof of that.
In The Day the Earth Blew Up, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both voiced by Eric Bauza) have grown up lovingly raised by Farmer Jim (Fred Tatasciore), a kindly man who took in the abandoned animals as babies. But when Farmer Jim passes on to become a giant cloud in the sky, he gives them one final word of advice: take care of their home. Years later, Daffy and Porky have … sort of done that, with their house a mess of creaky wooden boards and duct tape thanks to their antics as, well, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. But when a home inspector discovers a gaping hole in their roof — with some curious-looking bright-green goo on it — they’re left with one option: rustle up enough money to repair it, or get thrown out. After a chance encounter with the eccentric inventor Petunia Pig (Candi Milo) lands them a job at a chewing gum factory, the two of them discover a terrifying conspiracy involving an alien invasion and mind control.
Directed by Pete Browngardt and written by a small army of writers, The Day the Earth Blew Up is the first-ever fully animated feature-length Looney Tunes movie created for the big screen, and it’s keenly aware of that. It carries its history on its sleeve, opening with a montage of what could pass as classic Looney Tunes shorts — Daffy Duck and Porky Pig getting into screwball hijinks that destroy all kinds of public and private property. But a feature-length Looney Tunes movie can’t just be a collection of hysterical shorts, they’ve got to string together some kind of coherent narrative. The story of The Day the Earth Blew Up is simple and relatively bulletproof (we’ve seen this kind of plot before in films like Jimmy Neutron), but the real strength of the film is in how it is really just a buddy comedy between Daffy Duck and Porky Pig.
The movie kicks off with Porky and Daffy discovering a hole in their roof with strange alien goop around it.
The entire Looney Tunes ensemble is so beloved that you could easily have thrown every single recognizable character in there and have a blast. But once Bugs Bunny shows up with his carrot-eating grin, he knocks the wind out of every other character — and The Day the Earth Blew Up is wise to leave him out (sorry, Bugs fans). Instead, the Daffy and Porky dynamic is highlighted and enriched, with the movie following them from childhood to adulthood, and seeing their close, if sometimes challenging, relationship grow. Porky is the perfect stuttering straight man to Daffy’s crazy, wild ways, and the film’s choice to center itself on just the two of them makes the film’s surprising emotional payoff even better. After, of course, they get into some wildly ridiculous bits of tomfoolery.
The Day the Earth Blew Up is proof that you can bring the Looney Tunes into the modern age of cinema, and not have to rely on NBA stars that can barely deliver a line. While it’s a shame that it had to fight so hard to make it to the big screen, it was worth it — and hopefully will save the rest of the Looney Tunes franchise from oblivion. Because even in this day and age, The Day the Earth Blew Up is a nice old-fashioned testament to the power of 2D animation and a good old mallet to the head.
