Just the Ticket #176: The Day the Earth Blew Up - A Looney Tunes Movie
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| The Day the Earth Blew Up A Looney Tunes Movie Review |
a.k.a. The Ticketmaster.
I've spoken my Piece several times (most recently at the beginning of Monday's Anime Spotlight on Rascal Does Not Dream Of Bunny Girl Senpai) on my feelings about what the empty heads atop Warner Bros. have done and plan to do to the company's animation division and history. It sucks, it hurts, and I don't want to talk about it anymore.
Instead, I'll hope that you had a happy Easter this week and keep the celebration rolling with an extra course of pork and duck, brought to you by one of America's favorite condiments: Ketchup.
Just please remember to stay away from any unusual chewing gum, and Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't get shelved and stripped of my identity for an incompetent billionaire's tax write-off, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my Looney content.
Director Peter Browngardt (the mind behind Uncle Grandpa and the enjoyably disturbing Looney Tunes Cartoons) had an idea in 2019 - when he was working on the first season of Looney Tunes Cartoons - for a fully animated (unlike Space Jam or Back In Action), totally original movie (unlike the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie and other compilation anthology films of its era) that would riff on alien invasion films of the 1950s and star Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, and The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie was born.
It would not be in development until late 2021 (for obvious, globally significant reasons that took place over the prior two years) and encountered a few distribution issues (for previously stated reasons that I will not restate for my own psychological health) and a stupidly juvenile and boring name change that feels tailor-made to intentionally tank the movie for creative accounting purposes (Looney Tunes: Bubble Brains) before being restored to its original title for theatrical release earlier this year and its subsequent physical and digital distribution by Looney Tunes saviors Ketchup Entertainment (Big Game, a movie that, like White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen, makes me nostalgic for the eight-year period when we had a president so cool that Morgan Freeman, Jamie Foxx, and Samuel L. Jackson got to play stand-ins for him in said movies, instead of the real-life Idiocracy we're experiencing now at the hands of a 90s action movie villain and a senile 80s gangster movie stereotype).
And after all of that, The Day the Earth Blew Up is...slightly better than fine.
The animation (handled by Superjail's titmouse, Inc., Castlevania's Powerhouse Animation Studios, and the scattered remnants of Warner Bros. Animation, among others) is amazingly fluid and expressive, and has the same, updated Bob Clampett style as Looney Tunes Cartoons. The voice cast, whom I will interject later as their characters come up, do their roles and the story being told the justice they deserve. And I genuinely laughed several times.
Now that the good has been given its due, it's time to get critical!
The Day the Earth Blew Up begins with a scientist (voice of the Incredible Hulk Fred Tasciatore doing an inconsistent William Shatner impression) tracking a meteor when a UFO (or whatever acronym we're using these days because identifying a UFO just makes it an FO, and you know what that stands for...) crashes. Someone's roof is destroyed and something happens to the scientist offscreen, and the opening credits take us through a montage of Porky and Daffy (both voiced by Eric Bauza, who does a decent approximation of Mel Blanc's performances, and previously voiced Daffy in Cartoons and the Animaniacs reboot) in their early years as they are raised by Farmer Jim (also voiced by Tasciatore, and he's animated like an "Invasion Of the Bunny Snatchers" doppelganger until he dies and becomes a giant plot device later, which I found hilarious). Less hilarious is the unnecessary flashback from later in the movie with an ill-fitting Bryan Adams needle-drop.
Never mind that Porky and Daffy seem to be two of the only immortal, talking animals in this movie's Universe (from how much their surroundings have changed and industrialized between the opening credits and the present, it's like they're pushing 100 and barely look any different from their source designs) because it turns out that roof with the big, goo-lined hole in it belongs to the house they inherited from Farmer Jim (only now the house looks like they hired Goofy to do their plumbing and had a hoarder do their interior decorating and housekeeping...except that Daffy made it look like moldy, cluttered ass for free). Plus, it's Home Inspection Day and they fail because of Daffy acting like a Tim Allen character on a crack/meth cocktail (and the hole in the roof). So to get money to fix their roof, the boys run through a montage of jobs (that they get fired from because of Daffy) until they land at the local gum factory (wearing their designs from "Baby Bottleneck," which was a deep cut I appreciated) and meet Petunia Pig (Candi Milo, of...everything), the factory's eccentric flavor profiler who's trying to invent a gum with explosive flavor (which, if you know the multiple meanings of the titular Blew Up, is an obvious Chekov's Gum for later) and serves as a blatant, cynical voice of commentary against lazy rebranding and deceptive psychological marketing tactics. Porky is immediately smitten because pigs, and not only does Daffy suddenly become Duck Blocker In the Year 2025 1/3 because his role in this semi-serious cartoon for children is to repeatedly screw up everything, he also ends up ruining everything because he sees the zombified scientist dump alien roof goo into the gum vat and now he's the bumbling conspiracy theorist who knows what's going on in a bad Roland Emmerich movie but I repeat myself. Nobody believes him, he and Porky get fired; the world gets taken over by sentient chewing gum, and our heroes are forced to turn their new trio dynamic into a basic, weak, "liar revealed" plot (because Porky is a selfish, passive-aggressive, timid little pig-shit) while they attempt to cure the planet of the alien influence with the power of olfactory science, an action montage (that Daffy "helps" his way into disrupting at the very last possible moment, dooming them all because that definitely, sarcastically, hasn't gotten old yet), and Toon Force logic. Perhaps the best part of this middle section is the crazy creative animation that went into what I'm just going to call the Gum-Thing. The Porky/Petunia montage is a distant second because it also looks amazing, but is soured by Daffy's interference and the formulaic plot structure that surrounds it.
Also, somewhere in there, the movie has several visual and dialogue references to my favorite new Looney Tunes Cartoon, "Bubble Dum." I love how existentially gross it is!
Anyway, the liar revealed plot and the Body Snatchers/Thing/They Live/Act-One-of-a-Roland-Emmerich-movie patch-stiche (that's a patchwork pastiche if you've cared enough to read this far) plot resolve all at once when Daffy's aforementioned screw-ups get himself and Porky captured and Petunia assimilated, and the guys work through their differences and escape by short-circuiting the bars of their laser cage with a Justin Timberlake song's worth of tears
and defeating the gum's alien overlord (voiced by Ally McBeal star Peter MacNicol) in similar fashion to how Batman eluded Two Face in "Almost Got 'Im."
But then it turns out that the cackling, volatile, evil-coded, comedy relief villain who enslaved the entire planet and tried to kill our heroes on multiple occasions throughout the movie was a good guy actually because he wanted to save Earth's most precious resources (it's those overpriced tapioca balls people put in tea to clog your straw and your colon and make your convoluted morning beverage taste like sugary cardboard with a shot of ass), and the movie is Armageddon now.
No pastiche or parody qualifier here; the third act of The Day the Earth Blew Up is literally just Porky, Petunia, and Daffy stopping the annihilation of Earth by navigating to the center of a Michael Bay-scale meteor and blowing it to pieces, complete with one character staying behind to sacrifice himself for the others. Also, it's still a bit Emmerich (particularly his more recent movies) because the crazy conspiracy nut gets to save humanity.
Remember that "Chekov's Gum" joke I made earlier? Well, the explosive that our heroes use is Petunia's beta flavor explosion gum! But because it can only explode when chewed and wind-up chattering teeth are mechanically unsound, Porky allows Daffy to "fix" the situation by causing an earthquake that drops stalactites onto the gum, simulating a chewing motion, which was more creativity than I had been expecting out of this movie by this point.
The scene where Daffy beats himself up with a car that is suddenly in the cage with them for Toon Force reasons and neither of them treats it like a practical means of escape also made me laugh. There are too many jokes that go on for far too long in this movie, and the main duo are irritating characters for various reasons, but like I said, I genuinely laughed several times, and this was one of those times.
Porky, Daffy, and Petunia are hailed as heroes when they return to a gum-splattered Earth, but there's still the matter of their house (which was destroyed by gum zombies earlier in the film). Fortunately, Farmer Jim appears like the ghost of Paul Bunyan ex machina to tell the boys about a conveniently worded insurance policy he filed because they're cartoon characters and Daffy is insane, and they roll credits with a new house, Porky and Petunia hook up, the alien gets his Boba, and something, something, new gum flavor that explodes but doesn't kill or zombify people, That's All, Folks!
Like I said, the animation is fluid and elastic, the voice talent is peak, the jokes that land do so with a thunderous mix of intelligence and visceral joy, and the WB references are subtle and deep enough to reach fans without pandering. But on the other hand, the jokes that fail overstay their welcome, Porky and Daffy's odd couple chemistry that worked so well in short form makes them unlikable at feature length and fuels one of the most predictable story structures ever to be overused (the liar revealed), the plot twist makes very little character sense even for a movie where a duck and two pigs fight alien chewing gum zombies with the fate of Earth's Boba supply on the line, the movie is too juvenile for casual viewing adults (obvious foreshadowing, simple character writing, repetitive lowbrow humor and slapstick) yet sometimes too pervy and visually disgusting for children (the sexualization of Petunia Pig, and the hyper-detailed, Ren & Stimpy-esque gross-out close-ups), and the plot is so obviously derivative of so many things (even just stealing another movie's third act) that The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie would feel like a Friedberg & Seltzer joint if it weren't so concerned with fitting its handful of comedy cartoon icons into a world it takes so seriously.
This is how negative I can get when I give myself time to overthink a movie, folks; I had fun in the moment, but I can't deny having cringed as often as I laughed, or feeling like something was off with the tone of it all (maybe the six credited writers had something to do with it?). When you know you're the target audience and you find yourself questioning who a movie is for, it doesn't take a gumshoe to figure out that something is amiss.
C+
Once again, please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't get shelved and stripped of my identity for an incompetent billionaire's tax write-off, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my Looney content.
Ooh! Street gum; my favorite fruit!
Ticketmaster,
*pained contorting sounds*
CHEW!
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