(courtesy IMP Awards)
Nostalgia, handled carefully, can be a wonderful thing.
You can relive and renew your love for something that gave you, and likely still gives you, great joy, and as long as it doesn’t ensnare and entrap you from adding to your living library of life experiences, you can be enriched all over again.
But sometimes, nostalgia goes rogue – which is a big ask since it’s all sighs and awwws and rose-coloured recollections of days gone by; hardly the stuff of renegade actioning – and you get so lost in what was, or the thing you love does, or both, that what was good about it seems to diminish, wither and husk, a husk of its former glory that doesn’t carry the impact it once did.
Not everything avoids that fate, including quite a few pop culture properties, but some do, such as the Muppets and Star Trek, and to this ever inventive group you can now add Looney Tunes, which kicked off with “Sinkin’ in the Bathtub” on 19 April 1930 at the Warner Bros. Theater in Hollywood and which has done a reasonably good of twisting and turning with the ephemeral and fast-changing whims of pop culture ever since.
At near a century old, you could be forgiven for letting the franchise lose yourself in the frantically technicolour explosive mists of their own particular brand of in-your-face nostalgia, but if The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie is any indication, this particular band of zeitgeist longstayers are a long way from letting that happen.
Inspired by the Looney Tunes Cartoons series, developed by Pete Browngardt and which debuted in 2019 at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, The Day the Earth Blew Up is, if you can believe it, the first film in the franchise to be composed of wholly original material and to get a big, epic cinema release.
That alone is a “screw you nostalgia” milestone all of its own, but what The Day the Earth Blew Up does brilliantly well is take the look and feel, and indeed the soul, of a 1950s B-grade sci-fi film and give a manic 21st century polish and shine.
It helps immensely that the polish and shine being so administered is done by two of the franchise most beloved and long-running characters, Daffy Duck (87 years old, premiering in “Porky’s Duck Hunt” in 1937) and a more senior Porky Pig (90 years old who first appeared in “I Haven’t Got a Hat” in 1935), both voiced by Eric Bauza, who, along with Petunia Pig (voiced by Candi Milo; first appearance in “Porky’s Romace” in 1937) end up having to save the Earth from a nefarious alien who uses chewing gum to zombiefy and enslave the world.
Now, much as you love these characters, and 95 years of rapt attention to their slapstick, verbally hilarious hijinks would suggest we do, we really do, they likely aren’t the first “people” you’d call on to save the Earth from being subjugated by aliens who seem to have evil on their mind.
But that’s where, with all due respect, you might be wrong because they turn out to be just the combo we need to keep the aliens at bay, save the day and take back our planet, even if it does end up covered in gelatinous giant globs of iridescent pin bubblegum.
Take Daffy’s blisteringly manic fury and jumpily destructive physicality – this is the Daffy of old who isn’t quite as snarlingly, hilariously entertaining and a teeny bit obnoxious as he became in his later vs. Bugs Bunny years – and Porky’s more considered ability to assess the situation at hand, and add in Petunia’s scientific ability, at least in the this film, to come up with innovative solutions and cheerlead wholeheartedly, and you have the sort of team you’d want rushing to the defense of a planet about to fall under the sway of an alien cartoon villain who, it turns out, may not be so binary as he first appears.
The result of teaming these two longtime pals, and sometime adversaries – in the film they are adopted brothers of the mysterious Farmer Jim who disappears off, literally, at one point into the sunset, leaviing them to fend for themselves on their family farm – is purely, charmingly energetic entertainment.
The Day the Earth Blew Up is a film that acts as a love letter to the long-running Looney Tunes franchise, hitting all the touchpoints we love including the immortal uttering of “That’s All Folks!” by Porky Pig and some furiously comedic pinballing by Daffy Duck, while also staring down nostalgia and giving one of Warner Bros. crown jewels (though you may have had cause to wonder after the Coyote Vs. Acme tax debacle) a vigorously HILARIOUS shot in its elastically animated arm.
But while there is comedy, verbal, slapstick and every giggling, guffawing, side-splitting variant in-between, The Day the Earth Blew Up also has a huge amount of heart, something that might surprise you if all you remember about Looney Tunes is its wondrously amusing propensity for slapstick hilarity.
The film, under the careful direction of Pete Browngardt, and a veritable of thoroughly talented writers, devotes a delightful amount of time to establishing the close and sustaining brotherhood between Porky and Daffy who, though they may bicker and fallout at times – besides the aliens, there’s also a fairly big earthbound threat to their domestic happiness that they must contend with – really and deeply care for each other.
That’s important because wildly funny and epically off-the-charts as the film is, The Day the Earth Blew Up really works at its heart because of the relationship between the two central characters who may quip and oneliner and buzz around like they’re on endless sugar highs (well, Daffy anyway) but at the end of the day, really matter to each other.
And as a result, really matter to us as viewers which is vital because while the The Day the Earth Blew Up will tickle your funny bones with a ferociously intensive mania that does not rest for a second, it works because Porky and Daffy love each other, they love their home and their planet and they’ll do anything to save it.
In the end though, The Day the Earth Blew Up is a joy because it takes the nostalgia of loving something that’s been around a good long while and gives it all a blazingly fun new lick of paint, a buoyantly hilarious new soul all while letting it be the very thing we have loved all these years, and if this inspired and masterful updating of the franchise is any guide, will love for a good many years more.