Posted in: Movies | Tagged: daffy duck, hbo max, looney tunes, porky pig, The Day the Earth Blew Up, WB

The Day the Earth Blew Up: How WB Classic Cartoon Updates Don't Work

The Day the Earth Blew Up highlights WB's attempts to update Looney Tunes cartoons, but it pays homage to the classics and can't make up its mind.

On a long flight recently, I was too tired to watch anything heady, so for the hell of it, I watched the recent Looney Tunes movie The Day the Earth Blew Up out of curiosity, and I figured it was all my addled brain could take. Porky Pig and Daffy Duck take on an evil alien trying to take over the world with chewing gum that turns people into mindless zombies. Okaaaay… It was a baffling experience, a movie that couldn't make up its mind what it wanted to be. Since the movie is now on HBO Max, you might be interested in watching it to make up your own mind.

Who is This Movie for?

Really, who is this movie for? Hipsters? The dwindling number of old people nostalgic for classic Looney Tunes? The small and shrinking niche of classic Hollywood animation fans?

The Day the Earth Blew Up is full of homages and callbacks to the old Tex Avery cartoons, and the character design is a cross between the Avery style and the style of the now-cancelled John Kricfalusi, who can be said to have taken that Avery cartoon style to new grotesque heights. That feels like a mistake. Sure, for edgy and punk teens and college students or Adult Swim fans (are there any left?), this might be punk rock, but classic Looney Tunes is considered by younger fans today as old and unhip.

Also, it's not funny. None of it is funny. It works too hard and it shows.

Too Weird and Violent for Little Kids, Too Corny and Dull for Adults

The script of The Day the Earth Blew Up keeps trying to solve things that aren't problems: who cares that Daffy and Porky were raised together as orphans? Who cares that Porky has a stutter from brain damage after Daffy accidentally brained him with a blunt object? Why does Daffy's tendency to go berserk and smash things with a hammer need to be portrayed as a tragic mental pathology? Why do we need an origin story for them? This is all tedious modern screenwriting lessons about "grounding" and "backstory", and the writers here don't seem to understand that nobody ever wanted or needed to know about Porky or Daffy's "backstory", ever. They're slapstick comedy archetypes, not Chekovian tragedians.

The classic cartoons from the 1940s simply took the characters took them through the slapstick wackiness without any need for moral messages. The story of the movie veers between the old Looney Tunes slapstick chaos and attempts at corny kids' life lesson "friendship is everything and love conquers all" bullshit. It's too violent and grotesque for young kids and too cloyingly corny for older audiences. Despite everyone who made it working their asses off, there is really no appeal in this movie. It was too timid to go full madness, only dipping its toes in that pool whenever it needed to liven things up from the kiddie cartoon dullness—no wonder it was nixed from HBO Max and leased to another outlet for the extra change.

If the updated Looney Tunes cartoons are like The Day the Earth Blew Up and Coyote vs. Acme, I totally see why they were cancelled from HBO MAX. There is no longer any mass appeal in Looney Tunes. It's your great-grandpa's cartoons. This begs the question: Could the Looney Tunes cartoon characters be past their sell-by date? Is interest waning or can they still be rebooted or updated to feel new and exciting to young viewers? The Day the Earth Blew Up doesn't answer that question. On a streamer, it might be mildly diverting, but not something to attract and audience or subscribers.

The Day the Earth Blew Up started streaming on HBO MAX on June 27th. Who knows if it's attracted new subscribers?

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