Woo-Hoo! We have ourselves a Daffy and Porky movie!
Some of the most delightful Daffy Duck and Porky Pig cartoons I’ve grown up include “Tick Tock Tuckered,” “Baby Bottleneck,” “The Prize Pest,” and “Daffy Doodles,” and two of my choices were directed by Bob Clampett, who knew a delightful classic cartoon when he saw one. Now, we have the pig and the duck together again in “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie,” which is directed by Peter Browngardt (“Uncle Grandpa”), who uses Clampett inspiration in the animation, while trying his own take on Sci-Fi B-movies.
I remember when I placed “Moonfall” on my Worst of 2022 list, I mentioned this: “Ever since Orson Welles read “The War of the Worlds” on the radio in 1938, people have been entertained by movies or fake news about aliens or space rocks destroying our planet.” Please don’t ever make fun of me for being scared of an apocalypse. And seeing Porky and Daffy handling the genre is much more reassuring.
I should also mention that this is the first fully animated “Looney Tunes” movie to get a theatrical release without Michael Jordan or Brendan Fraser or LeBron James trying to help make them popular again. In fact, a few years ago, I voted “Space Jam: A New Legacy” as the worst film of 2021 for disrespecting our favorite cartoon characters and the studio itself. “The Day the Earth Blew Up” is miles and miles ahead of that “deththpicable” mess in every way.
Porky and Daffy aren’t covered in CGI effects or celebrity voices, but they are voiced by Eric Bauza, who does everything he can to honor Mel Blanc, and succeeds very well. There’s also a chemistry between them that’s not only their original wacky selves, but also on a personal level.
The plot? They need to get jobs in order to save their beloved home from demolition. So, Porky’s crush Petunia (voiced by Candi Milo) manages to hook them up with jobs at the gum factory, which is developing a new flavor, which she knows is just a carbon copy of the original. That “new flavor” gets tainted by alien goo, which turns the people who chew it into zombies. Daffy catches on and tries to warn people, but they, along with Porky, think he’s crazy for obvious reasons. However, these two and Petunia must collaborate to save the Earth.
There are very few celebrity voice actors in the film, like Wayne Knight as the town mayor and Peter MacNicol as the alien with the gum plot. He has the manic energy and characteristics of a cartoon character, and so, he’s able to reflect that on this alien. But we don’t need celebrities telling people that a new “Looney Tunes” movie is in theaters; we need Daffy and Porky to tell people that. And Bauza delivers the goods as those two, while Milo, who is a veteran voice actress, is delightful as Petunia.
The gum chewing parts might be a little intense for smaller kids (especially for the way the gum attaches itself to human brains), but for everyone else, there’s a lot of energy, nostalgia, and flexibility for anyone who grew up on classic “Looney Tunes” cartoons. I grew up on them, and I even praise shorts that got the short end of the stick. So, it was a lot of fun to see Daffy and Porky in their own territories, but still able to adjust to the 2020s without condescending themselves. Not at all like the Notorious P.I.G. in “Space Jam: A New Legacy.”
I did an interview with Browngardt on this movie last December, and I told him it was a very impressive step up from TV cartoons to movies. And now, I’m telling you readers this: “The Day the Earth Blew Up” is both a movie and a cartoon, and d-d-d-d-d-efinitely worth the price of admission. That’s me speaking like Porky.
