Director: Peter Browngardt
Screenplay: Darrick Bachman, Pete Browngardt, Kevin Costello, Andrew Dickman, David Gemmill, Alex Kirwan, Ryan Kramer, Jason Reicher, Michael Ruocco
Producers: Peter Browngardt, Sam Register
Starring: Eric Bauza, Candi Milo, Peter MacNicol
Year: 2024
Country: USA
BBFC Certification: PG
Duration: 91 mins
I’ve made no secret over the years about who I consider to be the greatest movie star of all time. Is it Chaplin?, you ask. Jimmy Stewart? Barbara Stanwyck? Meryl Streep? Tommy Wiseau? All would be fine choices, of course, but my pick for all-time favourite screen presence is Daffy Duck. I’m not being facetious here (OK, I’ll give you the Tommy Wiseau thing), this is a long held opinion on which I become firmer with each passing year. But how could I possibly even entertain the idea of putting Daffy Duck in the same league as those aforementioned screen icons? After all, he’s just a drawing, right? Wrong. Daffy is, in fact, hundreds of thousands of drawings. The result of years and years of vibrant, intricate, highly skilled artistry from dozens of different animators. Also helping Daffy become the icon that he is today were the guiding directorial hands of Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones, overseeing his evolution from an insane anarchist to a plucky narcissist to an avaricious opportunist, all the while controlling the shifts in order to keep fans convinced that this was plausibly the same character. Another crucial anchor in this respect was the voice characterisation of Mel Blanc, who imbued Daffy with his instantly recognisable cocky lisp. The scripts of Warren Foster, Ted Pierce and Michael Maltese experimented with Daffy’s personality and potential. This little black duck has more parents than an inter-school PTA meeting, simultaneously filling him with a wider range of recognisable traits, tics and emotions than any flesh and blood actor could manage. So when people ask me, how can Daffy Duck be one of the greatest movie stars of all time when he isn’t even alive? I tell them to look again. Animation at its best is more invigoratingly alive than the unadventurous eye could ever hope to behold.
Hopefully this impassioned plea illustrates just how strongly I feel about the many incarnations of Daffy Duck. There are, however, versions of Daffy that don’t quite justify the pedestal on which I’ve planted him. Unlike human movie stars, cartoon icons neither age nor die, which can result in approximations of the character that wear modern contexts as convincingly as your grandfather wears a backwards baseball cap. Growing up in the 90s, I owned plenty of Looney Tunes merchandise that attempted to depict these classic characters in a hip-hop style. My dedication to the cartoons I loved kept me coming back but even my resolve was tested by certain product. To this day I have never seen Space Jam or its belated sequel. Nevertheless, I am glad of the longevity of Daffy and his contemporaries, even if many of their latter day appearances have seemed disconcertingly off, because sometimes those animators, directors, voice artists and writers still get them right, and when they do the combination of the nostalgic rush and the thrill of brand new martial is a powerful payoff.
The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is Looney Tunes done right. Of course, there are certain small concessions made to modern sensibilities, but these characters were always shifting to incorporate societal changes even across their initial Golden Age appearances, so jokes about poop and butt cracks are not as crassly out-of-place as some commentators might have you believe. The animation style of The Day the Earth Blew Up is based on that of Bob Clampett, the wildest of the Golden Age directors, and Clampett was known for inserting off-colour gags into his films more than any of his contemporaries. It is refreshing to see Clampett’s work used as inspiration as its go-for-broke wackiness has long been deemed too extreme to be recreated in most mainstream animation. Even from the early trailers for The Day the Earth Blew Up, I recognised the reference point and that alone was enough to get me excited. For so long, the avaricious, selfish and narcissistic Daffy associated with the work of Chuck Jones has been the standard Daffy we’ve been given in modern incarnations. While I love this Daffy as much as any other version, the return of the rubbery lunatic duck of earlier years is a welcome spectacle to behold. True, this is a slightly sanitised version compared to the wild Daffy of shorts like 1938’s The Daffy Doc, in which his terrifying anarchy is more horrific than hilarious. The Day the Earth Blew Up wisely opts to make its Daffy a more likeable figure, without necessarily toning down the potential destructiveness of his lunacy.
The continued popularity of Bugs Bunny meant that most modern versions of Daffy continued to emphasise his competitive relationship with the wascally wabbit but The Day the Earth Blew Up goes back to the earlier pairing of Daffy and Porky Pig, a partnership that defined the earliest years of the duck’s development. Director Peter Browngardt and his large team of writers understand that original dynamic of Daffy and his porcine pal, contrasting the duck’s insanity with the pig’s gentle affability. Porky is very much a product of an early rash of star characters whose personalities were based on virtuous pluck above comedic potential. The same was true of Mickey Mouse, whose immediate iconic status belied the fact that he was invariably upstaged by his co-stars on purely comedic terms. But pair characters like this with the right foils and they provide a dramatic linchpin around which the more anarchic occurrences can revolve. Deprived of a comic partner, it’s no wonder Porky spent so many years on the sidelines. Reteamed with his old compadre, it’s clear just how much the pig has been missed by both audiences and the duck himself, even if on their very first meeting, 1937’s Porky’s Duck Hunt, he had been trying to kill him (89 years ago. Forgive and forget, eh?!).
Along with reuniting Daffy and Porky, Browngardt’s other great masterstroke was to place them in a 50s-inspired sci-fi adventure. As well as classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Browngardt also took inspiration from Chuck Jones’s sci-fi parodies Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century and Rocket Squad. Although better remembered for pitting Bugs and Daffy against each other, Jones did not forsake Porky either, recasting him as the laconic, underestimated sidekick in several genre parodies. Although we see little of this more knowing version of the pig in The Day the Earth Blew Up, we can thank Jones’s dedication to the character for placing him in that sci-fi context for Browngardt to discover in the recesses of his brain well over half a century later. The plot Browngardt settled on is perfectly pitched between silliness and classic tropes, with a new bubblegum flavour turning consumers into mindless zombies. The gum angle allows for lots of great, gloopy gags while the mind-control angle is given the necessary dramatic weight to create the narrative forward drive of classic sci-fi. Bad Looney Tunes approximations are often in too much of a hurry to get to the gags and forget just how brilliant the writers of the original shorts were. The Day the Earth Blew Up makes no such mistake.
Another thing The Day the Earth Blew Up gets right is not overloading itself with classic references, the like of which had weighted down cartoon superfan Joe Dante’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action. While there are plenty of nice allusions for longtime fans, they are smoothly incorporated into the plot in a manner that doesn’t require new viewers to be aware of the reference points. Browngardt is just as enthusiastic about telling his story as he is about resurrecting this character dynamic. That said, the Looney Tunes obsessive in me did get an enormous buzz from the tremendous animation, which beautifully captures the style of Clampett’s madcap shorts without resorting to soulless pastiche. Also exceptional is Eric Bauza, who voices both Porky and Daffy in a way that captures the sound and characteristics of Blanc’s performances but rises above mere imitation, with subtle tweaks allowing the characters’ convincing adaptation for modern audiences.
While still retaining their iconic status, the Looney Tunes characters are not as ubiquitous as they were when I was a kid, when any gap in the TV schedules would be plugged with classic cartoons. But if current schedulers are warier of the content of these old cartoons that were, after all, aimed at adults as much as children, we can be thankful for generations of fans who became filmmakers themselves and continue to find ways to keep these classic characters alive. The Day the Earth Blew Up is one of the most exciting examples of a new generation of Looney Tunes content done right.
Looney Tunes: The Day The Earth Blew Up will be in UK & Irish cinemas from 13th February 2026. Find your nearest cinema at: http://r.press.strike-media.com/mk/cl/f/sh/1t6Af4OiGsE8LPMupY6CEOumKfW6Kp/8m7U_W7nar-k