It may seem unfathomable to children born in the 21st century that there was a time where characters like Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, and Speedy Gonzales were as popular as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy. The original Looney Tunes shorts that began in the 1930s were distinct from Walt Disney’s cartoons due to their madcap sensibilities, rampant destruction, and intent on entertainment value over sentimentality; there wasn’t any forced messaging within an unpredictable race across the desert that featured Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird. Looney Tunes never reached the cultural dominance of the Mickey Mouse shorts due to the lack of a creative director like Walt Disney. Nonetheless, it remains one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all-time, with several Academy Award-winning shorts, multiple theme park attractions, and countless comic, video game, and music spinoffs.
The absence of Looney Tunes from the streaming era can be attributed to disinterest on the part of Warner Brothers. Following the failure of the last live-action film, 2003’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Warner Brothers has taken no effort to reintroduce its catalog of characters to a new generation of children. Amidst criticism of racial stereotypes in older cartoons, Warner Brothers opted to avoid the debate entirely by thinning out its library; many of the original cartoons have been scrubbed from the Max streaming service.
Although an attempted comeback in the form of Coyote vs. Acme, a live-action/animation hybrid film that featured Wil E. Coyote alongside Will Forte and John Cena, was planned for a theatrical launch, the film was cancelled after David Zaslav’s team took over amidst Warner Brothers’ acquisition by Discovery. The initial outcry over the termination of a nearly-completed film (which has reportedly earned positive test screening scores) was enough to stir controversy for ethical reasons, but Zaslav’s regime doesn’t consider Looney Tunes to be a valuable asset.
The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie was intended to be an exclusive for HBO Max, as the few Looney Tunes programs that were still aired had gained their audience via the Warner Brothers subsidiaries Cartoon Network and Adult Swim. When Zaslav’s team began cutting costs, the new Looney Tunes film would be shopped to other services. While some studios sold completed films to Netflix and Prime Video during the theatrical shutdowns related to Covid, the insertion of an intended cinematic release into the marketplace is generally a sign of disaster. Nonetheless, a successful screening of The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival inspired the tiny distributor Ketchup Entertainment to acquire the rights for an intended theatrical rollout.
The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is the first feature-length animated film in the franchise; while there were several compilation films released directly to home media and a few live-action offshoots like Space Jam, Looney Tunes never seemed big enough for theaters. Perhaps audiences that were used to the shorts being a staple of Saturday mornings wouldn’t have felt the need to pay an additional fee to see what they were served at home. However, the loss of so much Looney Tunes history has made The Day The Earth Blew Up feel like the last stand for a nearly 100-year-old property on its last legs.
What’s most revolutionary about The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is that it’s not far removed from the first stage of colorized shorts that were popular in the 1950s. The slapstick adventure stars Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, two of the more sidelined Looney Tunes characters, in a science fiction adventure in which they’re tasked with the fate of the world following the landing of a UFO. Although the parodical references to 1950s B-movies like The Day The Earth Stood Still and War of the Worlds might be looked over by kids, the film is so self-contained that it hardly matters.
Hardcore Looney Tunes fans may praise the film’s replication of a classical style of animation; 2D animation is rare enough, and The Day The Earth Blew Up has the type of rough, physics-defining slapstick comedy that studios like DreamWorks and Illumination have avoided in favor of more “realistic” visuals. Although there’s a multitude of niche references for dedicated older viewers, the mythology of Looney Tunes isn’t complex enough that a child couldn’t understand the plot of The Day The Earth Blew Up. Even if there’s enough narrative thrust to avoid comparisons to the compilation films, The Day The Earth Blew Up is mostly an excuse for Daffy and Porky to get into mischief, while occasionally being framed as heroes.
The Day The Earth Blew Up isn’t devoid of emotion; there’s a relatively strong sentiment of friendship between Daffy and Porky, which is emphasized through flashbacks to their shared upbringing with Farmer Jim. Yet, the film has no interest in a subversion of the formula that has proven to be successful. Perhaps Warner Brothers’ concerns with the franchise is that Looney Tunes is about chaos and shock, and may not offer the same emotional catharsis found in Toy Story or even Despicable Me.
The lack of self-importance is why The Day the Earth Blew Up is fresh. It’s unlikely that a “legacy installment” in a franchise would win over any new fans, as it can be a barrier of entry to be bullied into the belief that this universe matters. The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes is great entertainment that doesn’t apologize for being old-fashioned; it’s not only the purest distillation of what the supposed “Golden Age of Animation” was all about, but the funniest, most accessible family film in some time.
