The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie

Tax Write-Off: The Movie

or

"As Long As the Plot Doesn't Twist!" (Foreshadowing)

 

There's never been a Looney Tunes feature film. No, No. Not the ones, where they combined live action with animation, like Looney Tunes: Back in Action or the Space Jam's (which kind of ham-strung the characters), or the compilation-movies that were put out to make a quick buck. I mean an actual feature film that featured the characters—any of them—in a full-blown story that lasted more than an hour. No, they were usually confined to ten minute shorts that used to be shown in between newsreels and previews in theaters ('way back in the day), or were syndicated into packages for Saturday morning consumption and maybe even prime-time. They were a ready-made property of the Warner Brothers studio and enough of them garnered recognition, even Oscars, that the studio kept churning them out, even as budgets got scrunched, then the Animation Department (dubbed "Termite Terrace") was sold lock, stock, and barrel (all made by Acme™) the finished product then scattered into whatever format made the old Warner studio the most money, the characters adorning T-shirts and appropriated for other swag. The characters were put out to pasture, to be re-processed into new versions by nostalgic directors like Spielberg. At the moment, there is a division of the studio called Warner Brothers Pictures Animation, which will make things like The Lego Movie or DC League of Super-Pets. The history is complicated, the business even more so, to the point where one of the intended Warner movies, Coyote vs. Acme, was shelved by current CEO David Zaslav, supposedly as a tax write-off (although it may be picked up for distribution by Ketchup Entertainment). This is a lot of boring business talk to start a review of a cartoon.

Speaking of which...Ketchup is releasing The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, because, although Warner might have given up on their animation projects, sometimes they turn out pretty good. And The Day the Earth Blew Up is not half-bad. Certainly, it has an interesting design sense, manages to keep the momentum going for the majority of its run-time, and does that enviable thing that few cartoons even try for these days: appealing to the adults while entertaining the kids. Sure, its basic plot is a compendium of sci-fi films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead, and even Deep Impact and Armageddon. But, every once in awhile, a character will make an off-hand remark or an aside that will genuinely make an adult spit-take their Coke-Zero. It's usually Daffy Duck.

Now, this Daffy is not the later Chuck Jones-version, vainglorious, craven and greedy, the antithesis of the cool, collected sneaky Bugs Bunny. This is the Daffy of the early cartoons, who was genuinely crazy and would often go off on a pin-wheeling, room-caroming fit of the hooting yips. That's because The Day the Earth Blew Up is done in the style of one of the most idiosyncratic of the Warner directors, Bob Clampett,* so the characters will look a bit "off" from modern interpretations, and they will be far more elastic as well. It will remind you of the animation of John Kricalfusi (the creator of "Ren and Stimpy")—a big fan of Clampett's style.

What happens is...a meteorite is spotted by an astronomer flying over the city of Grandview—home of the Goodie Gum Factory—and when he goes to investigate, he is overcome by glowing green goo and turned into a shambling zombie. The asteroid also puts a big hole in the roof of the home shared by Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, who were rescued as infants by Farmer Jim (who, curiously, is not very animated—comedically so—and is done in a painterly style like Thomas Hart Benton). Farmer Jim just...leaves one day (don't ask too many questions, kids!) and bequeaths their house to Porky and Daffy, and tells them they should always stick together. Easy to do in a town where the major industry is making bubble-gum.

That hole in the roof is pretty inconvenient, as the P and D have just done a once-over of their house for the "annual home standards review" and when the harridan of a mayor's wife comes to inspect, she gives them ten days to fix the hole or face demolition. But, without money to hire a contractor, they're forced to find a job, or—because of Daffy—a series of jobs that don't last very long.

Finally, they do get a job at the gum factory, where Daffy witnesses that zombie-astronomer drop that alien goo into a batch of the brand-new gum flavor "Super-Strongberry", which, when consumed, turns an ordinary person into a alien-controlled zombie. Daffy is put into a Qanon-like panic over the populace being taken over, but what he doesn't know is that it is all a plot by an alien invader trying to take over the mind of every human on Earth. Dastardly!

It's so over-the-top and done in an exaggerated almost horrific style that one can have a good time just watching the contortions of Daffy's and Porky's expressions as things transpire. This is not subtle stuff here, and every so often it is laugh-out-loud funny and that is tough to sustain in a feature-length cartoon.

Animation is a tricky business, and while the depicted spaceship is computer-generated, and some of the backgrounds have a pixelated feel, for the most part the film is plain old fashioned hand-drawn cartooning one frame at a time. You can spot some cost-cutting measures here and there, but the figures don't skimp, and some of the backgrounds have the reassuring weirdness of Maurice Noble from the old Warner days.

And it gets in a couple of digs at Warner management while doing so, which is right in the anarchic spirit of the Looney Tunes legacy. Maybe the execs should spend less time looking at their bottom line and looking at their product. At ten minutes, these things were classics. At feature length, they might be stretched a little thin (like chewing gum), but for a first time effort, this one does quite alright.

 

* Clampett had a long career at Warner, but he is perhaps better known for his creation of "Time for Beany" (the favorite show of both Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx) and its animated follow-up "Beany and Cecil".