Looney Tunes: The Day the Earth Blew Up review – still capers after all these years

2026-02-12 - 07:05

The trusty cartoon franchise brings Daffy Duck and Porky Pig back for fresh antics, updated pretty neatly for our times The Looney Tunes franchise has been regularly resuscitated and rebooted for new generations ever since Warner Bros stopped making the original cartoons back in the 1960s, creating more minutes of screen time than all the Dracula, Wuthering Heights and Jurassic Park remakes and spin-offs combined. Like some fiendish glue from the Acme corporation, the Looney Tunes IP is sticky, resilient stuff: instantly recognisable, easily dubbed into other languages, with codes and quirks peculiarly pleasing to audiences of all ages, and yet easily malleable to fit the comic modes and manners of each age. This feature, starring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both voiced by Eric Bauza), feels very 2020s – in that it’s not embarrassed about getting sappy from the off and then resolving its core dramatic problems with a big dose of child psychologist-friendly empowerment lessons about accepting people for who they are and the value of loyalty. Bizarrely for anyone raised on Saturday-morning repeats of the original 1930s-50s toons where the two were usually adversaries, Daffy and Porky are best friends forever here, raised together like brothers by their adoptive parent, Farmer Jim (Fred Tatasciore), who then promptly carks it in the first 10 minutes after enjoining them to always stick together. Continue reading...