Where’s Bugs Bunny? There are many ways this film’s makers could have made a bold statement. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie has decided to do it by presenting an animated whackadoodle comic adventure featuring Looney Tunes characters but minus the most famous one.
There’s not even the tip of a wabbitty ear to be seen in what’s claimed to be the first feature-length fully-animated Tunes to be released theatrically – the terms doing the work there are “fully-animated” (there have been a couple of feature-length Looney Tunes movies with live-action input) and “theatrically” (many straight-to-video features).
Instead of Bugs it’s Daffy Duck and Porky the Pig, who eventually team up with pretty female porker Petunia – so you can put lipstick on a pig – to save the world by blowing up an asteroid heading thisaway in a plot development borrowed from Armageddon.
But before we get to that, a hyperactive story about the entire planet becoming enslaved by zombiefying chewing gum. The Day the Earth Stood Still stumbles around in there too, as does the radioactive element from noir classic Kiss Me Deadly. In a chaotic 91 minutes, the hardest working person on this movie by far is Joshua Moshier, whose frantic, noir-adjacent, woo-woo sci-fi score attempts to corral all the various elements together in a zany, light-hearted Looney Tunes way.
The entire enterprise reeks of a huge lack of confidence – this film arrived on cinema screens almost by accident, movie-biz shenanigans only saving it at the eleventh hour from the fate Coyote Vs. Acme suffered – on, off, on again, maybe next year etc etc.
Daffy has been defanged – debeaked? – a touch and is less the cynical wiseass of his classic period, and more the neurotic and ineffectual Daffy who first arrived on screens in the 1930s, a screwball Duck for a screwball era, in a Porky Pig cartoon. The two would co-star together for many years, sometimes as buddies and other times as rivals.
Sometimes they even lived together, an Odd Couple pairing with no suggestion of a bromance. Porky has no visible genitals, so there’s no cause for alarm (unless a lack of genitals strikes you as alarming) and at one point in this movie Daffy – who is surely a Drake rather than a Duck – starts laying eggs. It’s all very confusing.
You can tell that something is not going well when the margins become more interesting than the main event. It’s unclear who this film is for. It has a storyline that won’t interest many beyond the age of puberty but some of the cultural references seem aimed at a grandparent or even great-grandparent generation – who knows who Ming the Merciless is, for example. This is not a movie appealing to parents with a nudge and a wink. And then, suddenly, a gear change and up pops REM’s The End of the World as We Know It as the backing to a montage sequence.
As regards the laffs, Daffy running into a door is not that funny unless there is a good reason why Daffy should not run into a door. Daffy being heroic also cuts right against the grain of his personality.
I could just write a list of the things I didn’t like or couldn’t fathom. But visually it gets by (high praise, I know) and the voicework by Eric Bauza does bring to mind Mel Blanc, the so-called Man of a Thousand Voices who voiced Daffy for over 50 years.
I laughed once. It was a nano-gag that involved Daffy, a chainsaw and a man with legs a-straddle in a shoeshine chair. It was arresting, potentially violent, went where cartoons can go but live action rarely does and it flew by in maybe a quarter of a second. Around it a string of bad taste gags that were also funny, done in a breakneck montage, including a man falling to his death from the undercarriage of a plane taking off. THAT. That’s what Looney Tunes is meant to be. Bad. Naughty, but with a wink. More of that!
The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
