Astonishing as it sounds, the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies brand has lasted over 90 years without a single totally-animated original feature-length film—never mind the compilations (The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, Daffy Duck’s Fantastic Island) and live-action hybrids (Space Jam, Looney Tunes: Back in Action). And now they’ve done it. As of March 14 this year, Warner Bros. is releasing The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, starring Porky Pig and Daffy Duck.
Much is at stake regarding the film’s box office performance, because major American studios have largely abandoned classical 2D animation. Day’s success—or failure—may very well determine the 2D feature-length animation’s future in North America.
Writer-director Peter Browngardt and supervising producer Alex Kirwan discuss their primary inspiration from Golden Age director Bob Clampett, the importance of the storyboard artists in crafting the story, why Warner Bros. finally produced a Looney Tunes feature, and how it could be made for an economical $15 million—in an era where CG animated features routinely cost well over $100 million. And of course, they tell us why you should see The Day the Earth Blew Up on the big movie screen.
Alex Kirwan: We made a 2D animated feature-length film. We love all forms of animation, but hand drawn animation is probably Pete and my favorite. It seemed like the right way to make this movie. We hope if people like this movie it’ll pave the way for other things like it, traditionally hand-drawn features to find their way into theaters.
Bob Miller: What persuaded Warner Bros. to actually do something like this?
Peter Browngardt: In Hollywood a lot of times you get pigeonholed into certain things. Like they’ll look at Looney Tunes and they’ll go, ‘Well that only works for a short form’ or ‘That only works if you have a star basketball player and you make it an ensemble cast.’ They don’t think that it has the sort of legs to hold up a story, but I didn’t feel that way and I don’t think Alex feels that way, and Sam Register and a few others at the studio felt that way. And we were fortunate enough to pitch this Porky and Daffy sci-fi comedy adventure film and and make it to this point. It’s really wild to think that it took this long but hopefully it starts a trend where you can get some more classic cartoon character feature films. They’ve done a few and other studios have done some, but this one’s unique to Warner Bros.
Kirwan: Warner Bros. had asked Pete and I to oversee a series of shorts previous to this [Looney Tunes Cartoons]. We made what, 200 Looney Tunes shorts? And they were incredibly fun to make and they were received well. And I think that helped give Warner Bros. the confidence that we knew these characters and had gotten their chops up a little bit with the property. And so they saw the potential in the future.
Miller: Could merchandise sales have convinced them yeah, let’s do a feature-length film?
Browngardt: I don’t believe so. Daffy and Porky don’t sell as many t-shirts as Taz or Tweety or Bugs. So it really wasn’t that. The initial push for the way I got involved initially with Looney Tunes was with Space Jam 2. It was something in the studio’s horizon and coming down the road. They wanted to re-energize Looney Tunes a little bit and make a bunch of shorts. So I was able to put together a great team of Alex and many others to help contribute and make these shorts. That was the initial sort of push to get some awareness of Looney Tunes back into the cultural zeitgeist. And then, like Alex mentioned, we had a successful team working with these characters and creating this stuff. So they were like, why not get a movie out of these guys at the same time?
Browngardt: [Sam Register] came to me and asked if I had any ideas for a film. I came back with basically the seed of this.
Miller: It was originally meant to present on Max, correct?
Browngardt: Correct, we got greenlit through Max, yes. And then, like most businesses, they go through ups and downs and we had a wild journey to getting to this point, but we got here and very happy to do so. And I believe we got here not only because the cost of the film wasn’t egregious, but also I feel like we made a good material and the film was coming out well. And I think we had a great team of people working on it.
Miller: It’s been reported that this was done for a budget of $15 million. How were you able to make it for that size of a budget? I mean, The Iron Giant was around $50 million and the CG films are easily over $100 million these days, even $200 million.
Browngardt: There’s a couple of reasons why I think we were smart economically with this film. Alex and I talked about the fact that we had a team, the right people in place. We didn’t have to redo stuff a thousand times and search and build and train and all these things to do. Sometimes you’re creating something of this caliber; Looney Tunes is highest caliber, in my opinion. So we already had the experience of making the shorts. We created a production model that get maxes out quality but lessens cost. We did character layouts to ensure that we didn’t have to redo scenes. We made the animators use the character layouts so we knew what kind of drawings we were gonna see on the screen. Things like that. A little bit more time upfront pays off in the back end in a lot of ways when you’re making these type of things. And we worked with several overseas studios and that does cut costs. We proudly animated some minutes here in the States, but most of the film was made in Canada or the Philippines.
Kirwan: I think we also felt strongly the stars of this movie are Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. It didn’t seem necessary to load this up with big name celebrities to try to boost it up. These characters have been around for like 90 years. They should be the draw onto themselves. They are the celebrities.
Browngardt: We only had to pay one voice actor [Eric Bauza for the leads]. So they shave in at least one paycheck.
Miller: Bob Bergen has specialized in Porky Pig for years. Was he just simply unavailable?
Browngardt: No, he was available. It was a choice. I really love Bauza’s take on Porky and Daffy and all the Looney Tunes. And I felt like it was the appropriate casting. Every time they do a Looney Tunes project, we start from scratch. No one owns it. The only person who owned these characters was Mel Blanc as far as being the one and true voice of any of the Looney Tunes cast. So, always a difficult cast. Casting is always difficult, but it was something that I felt was correct for this film.
Miller: Back to the economics of this, you say that pre-planning or planning had a great deal to do with keeping costs down?
Browngardt: Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Like having a small crew. In the grand scheme of things, we had a modest crew. We didn’t have a huge bloated crew of people. Everybody was really good at their job. Especially the board artists, which is arguably do some of the heaviest lifting in any film or any animated project. We had some of the best in the business. I was very, very happy with everybody in every aspect of the project.
Kirwan: I agree. We were helped tremendously by making the shorts for several years. How many years did we make those shorts for?
Browngardt: Yeah, in 2017 we started and we started the movie in 2019.
Kirwan: So I think over the course of creating, you know, a thousand minutes of Looney Tunes, we found the people who are most passionate about this property. And also the people who have history with this property and, you know, could teach us a few things about it as well. So when we rolled into this, we felt like we had a pretty great crack team who knew how Pete and I liked to work and knew our sense of humor and knew what we liked about Looney Tunes. Looney Tunes are about a thousand shorts made over the course of four decades. Looney Tunes are actually many different flavors, but Pete and I are very passionate about specific eras of Looney Tunes, specifically the sort of mid-1940s kind of Bob Clampett at Looney Tunes, and a lot of our sense of humor comes from that.
Browngardt: Tex Avery is definitely in there for me just because he left the studio in the early ‘40s. But Clampett particularly had it all: the energy, progressing the art form, the way he drew it, the way his crew did it, the animation, unpredictable and off-the-wall. The least conservative as possible version of Looney Tunes.
Clampett is a sort of a child of Avery. He was on the Avery unit. He learned from Avery. It all comes from Tex Avery in my opinion, all of it. I think the whole tone of Looney Tunes is his hymn. When he came to the studio it all changed. Everyone followed his lead. Even Freleng was influenced greatly by Tex in where the brand was going. But yeah, they’re like candy, Clampett cartoons. Just want to take a bite of them. They’re just gorgeous.
Kirwan: To be clear, we love all of it. We love all the directors.
Browngardt: Yes. Absolutely. Yeah.
Kirwan: But there is something about those mid-40s Clampett cartoons. They’re so manic, they’re so zany, they’re so high energy, they’re so pushed, and they’re all different from each other and you don’t know where they’re going to go. They’re the looniest of the Looney Tunes. And certainly we love Jones. It seemed like at a certain point in the world when they thought of Looney Tunes, they thought of these later Chuck Jones cartoons, which is great. But we really thought it was important to remind people that Looney Tunes was more than just that there were other flavors in there that were really great. And to your point about John Kricfalusi, I think he’d be the first to tell you that Bob Clampett is probably his biggest influence. I think we’re drawing from the same well there.
Browngardt: Stimpy literally has the Clampett nose.
Miller: Pete, you mentioned the importance of the storyboard guys. First of all, when you transitioned from Max to a theatrical release, did you have to change the screen aspect ratio on the board, because that’s what happened with Batman: Mask of the Phantasm?
Browngardt: Right, yeah. Yeah, that way, early on, I knew I wanted to do the film in Cinemascope because of the classic sci-fi films like Forbidden Planet and many others have the very super widescreen Panavision, whatever you want to call it.
Miller: And then the storyboard guys got writer credit. I mean, as they did back in the old days—
Browngardt: That was a big deal for me. I came from that area of production. I was a storyboard artist at Cartoon Network before I went into the creator role and producer role and direction roles. And I found very early on that these storyboard artists, I was like, wait a minute, we’re writing these things. We’re putting in the words; we’re writing the jokes. Especially Cartoon Network days, there’s premises and they would be loose. And because of production deadlines, sometimes it’s not fully baked and you have to figure it out. And I know SpongeBob’s done that way and a lot of great cartoons. And it’s how they made cartoons back in the day. You can’t really transcribe a classic Looney Toons into a script.
I mean, some of them might work but a Clampett cartoon for instance, trying to describe it in prose of what happens, just doesn’t really work. The job of a storyboard artist is his true sense of a cartoonist where somebody’s working with words and with a pen writing and a pen drawing and putting them together. The best animation comes from those types of minds. I got the biggest lunatics I could find and put them in a room together to try to make this. It’s a certain language and sensibility that not everybody has and the way of thinking about the world and seeing the world.
Miller: What’s next for you guys?
Kirwan: I’m gonna hold my cards close to my chest.
Browngardt: I’m allowed to say it. I’m working on a Aardman project with Pokémon.
Miller: Finally, what would bring audiences to see your film in theaters?
Browngardt: Who doesn’t like to laugh? I mean, laughter is the best medicine.
Kirwan: This is a comedy. Not all animated movies are comedies anymore. We tried very hard to make this a comedy.
Browngardt: And I will guarantee you that there’s something in that movie that you’ve never seen Daffy Duck do before in your life.
Interview conducted March 5, 2025 via Zoom.
Special thanks to Julia Allee, Alexandra B’Llamas-Reynoso, Dominick Durante, and Ava Intindola of 42West.
The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
Director: Peter Browngardt
Line Producer: Michael Baum
Supervising Producer: Alex Kirwan
Executive Producers: Peter Browngardt, Sam Register
Written By: Darrick Bachman, Peter Browngardt, Kevin Costello, Andrew Dickman, David Gemmill, Alex Kirwan, Ryan Kramer, Jason Reicher, Michael Ruocco, Johnny Ryan, Eddie Trigueros
Music By: Joshua Moshier
Edited By: Nick Simotas
Art Director: Nick Cross
Production Designer: Aaron Spurgeon
Production Company: Warner Bros. Animation
Released by Ketchup Entertainment
Run Time: 91 Minutes
World premiere: June 11, 2024 at the Annecy Film Festival
