Bounding in theaters on March 14, 2025, after several delays as the first fully-animated Looney Tunes movie in Warner Bros. Animation’s distinguished eighty-year history, “The Day The Earth Blew Up” represents a dynamic new direction for those iconic characters we’ve all grown to adore and laugh with.
Veteran animator and artist Peter Browngardt, executive producer of “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” is the director of this energetic hand-drawn Looney Tunes feature film that unites besties Porky Pig and Daffy Duck in a colorful sci-fi adventure that involves an unexpected alien invasion, mind-controlling chewing gum at a candy factory, and the famous cartoon buddies saving the planet.
“In my office, I had the poster for ‘Invasion of the Saucer Men.’ It’s one of my favorite posters ever made,” the first-time feature director tells Space.com.
“I told Warner Bros. that I just wanted to see Porky and Daffy in that, and I mocked up some stuff and some drawings. To my surprise, they went for it. I don’t think traditionally in Hollywood you’d say, ‘I want to make an ‘Ed Wood’ Looney Tunes movie,’ but I think they liked what we were doing with the shorts at the time.”
Browngardt and his creative crew have composed their entertaining 2D movie as an homage to nostalgic Golden Age sci-fi flicks like “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” There’s a perfect tonal pairing here since Looney Tunes hit their peak during the space race and UFO craze of the late ’50s and ’60s.
“‘The Thing’ and a lot of John Carpenter movies were also a big landmark for us on this film,” Browngardt notes. “But to be honest I got introduced to that genre and falling in love with those types of films of that era and style was Tim Burton. I grew up loving Tim Burton at a very early age, from ‘Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure’ all the way through ‘Mars Attacks.’ When you find a filmmaker you really respond to it’s like finding a band and you wonder what influenced that band and you start listening to bands that influenced them. Like who influenced Nirvana? Black Flag or The Melvins.”
“The Day The Earth Blew Up” has had a rocky road en route to the big screen, as it was originally intended as a direct-to-streaming release for Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max platform before entering a cost-cutting state of limbo courtesy of new CEO David Zaslav. Then the good fortunes of an enthusiastic screening at France’s Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June of 2024 landed the project a theatrical distribution partner in the indie firm, Ketchup Entertainment.
“Tim Burton always talked about being influenced by Hammer horror films and sci-fi movies and ‘Ed Wood.’ So I started watching those movies and they’re great. They’re fun and imaginative and don’t get enough credit for the inventiveness of story and plot that they came up with. It’s brilliant and really out of the box for wild thinking, reminiscent of ‘The Twilight Zone’ or Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson and people who can tell a compelling story and make you think how the world is put together.”
In an instance of serendipity, Browngardt has been pleased at the fortuitous timing of recent news stories about close-call asteroids potentially hitting the Earth, since the plot of “The Day The Earth Blew Up” coincidentally revolves around a meteor bringing an extraterrestrial visitor to our world to hatch a plot for planetary domination.
“It’s either the greatest marketing campaign that I’m not aware of, or what? A buddy of mine sent me a text message and said, ‘Dude, check it out. Your movie is becoming reality.’ I thought it was fake at first and that he was playing a goof on me.”
Looney Tunes and science fiction have a longstanding relationship, starting with the Duck Dodgers and Marvin the Martian shorts introduced at the dawn of NASA’s Mercury Program, and “The Day The Earth Blew Up” takes advantage of that full force.
“Looney Tunes were made for four decades from the ’30s to the ’60s, and they were a mirror of what was happening in entertainment and satirizing the world,” he explains. “Each decade of the Looney Tunes sort of represents the course of those forty years of what was going on in our country and our world. Science fiction films had a big uptick in the ’50s and they parodied that and made jokes about it. The sensibility is just engrained so it doesn’t feel that far of a stretch for these characters to be in a genre picture. Porky and Daffy work well in genre. They were in ‘Deduce, You Say’ which is detectives, they played cowboys, and all these different roles. I wanted to do a genre picture, I wanted it to be them, and I wanted a buddy comedy.”
Animation fans will jump to the instinctive conclusion that with Looney Tunes, you’re going to do a family movie with Bugs Bunny, but that’s not necessarily the case.
“Bugs is like a predator and prey relationship with Elmer Fudd, so it makes it more difficult to tell a larger story,” notes Browngardt. “Porky and Daffy give you a relatable relationship dynamic right away. I knew I needed to tell an emotional story to keep an audience engaged for ninety minutes. It can’t just be hitting each other over the head with hammers the whole time.”
“The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie” hits theaters on March 14, 2025.
