Comically massive in scale yet modest in ambition, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie thumbs its nose at our fascination with spectacle. Its cataclysmic science-fiction premise hinges on the loopiest of ideas, which is the Looney Tunes formula in a nutshell: Take a popular conceit and send it spinning in a cracked direction with warp-speed slapstick and throw-everything-at-the-wall humor. The film is ostensibly a spoof of ’50s sci-fi and horror, but it’s also a refreshingly daffy twist on modern-day Hollywood stakes-raising. The jokes might not be the funniest, the bits might not be the wittiest, but it’s all done with such verve and velocity that we might not notice. Especially in the wake of Coyote vs. Acme’s much-publicized extermination by the dark forces that run Warner Bros. nowadays, it already feels like a small miracle that The Day the Earth Blew Up (which was initially meant to premiere on Max but was handed off to a smaller distributor, Ketchup Entertainment) is even getting released.
Director Peter Browngardt, who already rebooted the Looney Tunes cartoons for Max several years ago, is an old hand at this by now. His new feature ably captures the Looney Tunes spirit, which is something our world can always use more of — and which is a far more formidable endeavor than might at first seem. The plot is gloriously stupid. An alien spaceship has spiked an immensely popular bubblegum with an interdimensional ectoplasm that turns everyone who chews it into zombies, and the only ones who can save humanity are bickering foster brothers Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both voiced by Eric Bauza). The always-bold, always-hyper Daffy is incorrigibly incompetent, while shy milquetoast Porky is too busy nursing a crush on beautiful gum-flavor scientist Petunia Pig (voiced by Candi Milo) to ever really accomplish much. Their hand-drawn antics play out against a backdrop of familiar (and welcome) Looney Tunes imagery: beautiful blue skies, verdant green lawns, mid-century architecture … with those sudden, jagged changes in shape and color and texture that this style of animation does so well. When Daffy’s face first blows up, it’s like we’ve been reunited with an old friend.
There’s a reason why the Looney Tunes franchise was built around shorts for most of its existence. Its goofy, devil-may-care logic and rapid-fire comedy rarely translated to feature-length run times. A lot of the early Looney Tunes features were just packaged shorts, and most original movies with these cartoon characters have been live-action hybrids (think Space Jam, or the wonderfully underrated Looney Tunes: Back in Action). The Day the Earth Blew Up gets around this challenge to some extent by effectively running through a multitude of narrative concepts, almost as if the film were itself a collection of shorts.
Thus, before the main story kicks in, we’ve already witnessed a montage of Daffy and Porky growing up, and we’ve also been treated to a film-within-a-film (complete with its own credits and everything) following these two adorable ding-dongs’ hapless attempts at employment. (They fail at delivering newspapers after Daffy invents a gun to shoot papers at people; they fail at being baristas after he abuses a customer whose order is too complicated; they fail at being influencers after he attempts a butt-dance and gets canceled.) When they do find steady jobs — at the local bubblegum factory, of course — color and detail drain from the screen and we’re treated to a Constructivist musical sequence featuring sepia silhouettes of Daffy and Porky dancing among the giant, churning gears of monstrous machines. Why? Why not?
Again, none of these gags could be called original, nor are they particularly hilarious in and of themselves — but when cut together in rapid succession, it all builds a lively head of comic steam. Even the cliché needle drops feel weirdly on point: A flashback sequence plays out against Bryan Adams’s “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You,” while one climactic scene is scored to R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” The whole thing works because once you’ve captured the casual vibe of a spoof, you can basically get away with anything. And one benefit of a plot built on relentlessly surreal happenstance is that eventually every new plot development starts to feel like a twist — because nothing is predetermined, and rationality and rigor have already gone out the window. And it’s all so, so fast. The highest compliment I can pay The Day the Earth Blew Up is that by the time it’s all over, it really does feel like we’ve just watched a Looney Tunes short, not an actual feature.