Peter Browngardt is currently the creative director of Looney Tunes Cartoons, and his first feature as a director, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, is set to be released theatrically in 2025 after initially being dropped from a planned Max release and being acquired by Ketchup Entertainment.
The Day the Earth Blew Up follows Porky Pig and Daffy Duck (both voiced by series regular Eric Bauza) as they uncover a conspiracy involving an alien invasion. It’s a delightful sci-fi romp that will appeal to both young audiences who are discovering Looney Tunes for the first time and older audiences who have grown up with the characters.
We at FandomWire got to speak with Browngardt timed to the film’s North American premiere at the Animation Is Film festival in Los Angeles, CA. Check out the interview below!
The Day the Earth Blew Up Interview
FandomWire: The Day the Earth Blew Up features Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, which is a less often explored dynamic than Daffy and Bugs. What made you interested in putting these characters together that we don’t see together as frequently?
Peter Browngardt: I wanted to do Porky and Daffy because early on in Looney Tunes — the black-and-white ‘30s cartoons, even some of the color ‘40s stuff — they were buddy comedy. They were not trying to kill each other. Most of the ones you brought up, like the Chuck Jones ones, Bugs and Daffy, they are trying to kill each other or get somebody else to kill each other. Bugs and Elmer are hunter or predator and prey, Sylvester and Tweety.
These guys, you don’t have to tell a story where they’re going to try to kill each other. They can go on a journey together. They can be your protagonist to tell this story through. So that was important.
They also played a lot of parts together in genre cartoons like Duck Dodgers, Rocket Squad, Robin Hood Daffy — stuff like that. So they could play many roles. I knew I wanted to do a genre film, and I knew I wanted to do sci-fi pretty early on because I’m a huge sci-fi fan and love the ‘50s and ‘60s sci-fi. That was the sandbox I wanted to play in telling the story and writing the film.
And it probably wasn’t the studio’s first choice. You think Looney Tunes, and you’re like, “Well, why isn’t Bugs Bunny in it?” But I think there is a movie to be made with Bugs Bunny, and it shouldn’t be Bugs Bunny and Foghorn Leghorn and Sylvester. I don’t think they should all be living together.
The tendency is to get them all in, put all of them in together, and I don’t know if that’s the best way these characters work. As entities separately, they work really well, but I think there are ways to get them to co-mingle. But it was the idea that I thought I could tell an emotional story too — a friendship story. And I knew to sustain an audience for 90 minutes, you had to have that emotional core to it. It couldn’t just be crazy jokes for 90 minutes. You’re gonna get bored of that.
FW: What do you think is the difference between telling stories like this in a short form, like Looney Tunes Cartoons, and in long form, like The Day the Earth Blew Up?
Browngardt: It’s an emotional story—an emotional core to the characters, a character journey. I didn’t want to change the characters and be “I’m the new Daffy Duck” or “I’m the new Porky Pig,” I wanted them to have an experience and learn something about each other but still be the core of the same character.
But I think to be able to engage an audience, it has to have an emotional arc or journey to the film, even if the characters don’t change. Like Dumb and Dumber, they learn. Well, I don’t know if they “learned” something, but they had experiences that affected them and affected their relationship, and you got to see how they felt about it. I think you have to have that to keep an audience. You can keep an audience with jokes for about 20 minutes, and then after that, you gotta have something more.
FW: There are also a lot of great horror elements to The Day the Earth Blew Up. Could you talk about some of those inspirations?
Browngardt: Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a big one. Shaun of the Dead was also kind of a buddy relationship comedy set in a genre of zombie movies. Just a fantastic film, one of my favorite films. There’s some noir. I love old noir films. I love Coen Brothers films, which are very influenced by noir films a lot of times.
That’s what’s fun about making a movie. There’s this whole history of ways to tell stories, and Looney Tunes is this perfect avenue to sort of lampoon it all, put it all together in a pot, and try to find its own tone and its own look and its own thing.
But we were never beholden to one thing we wanted to do. We sort of jump around in style, too. We have a sequence centered in more of a graphic art deco style. We have the opening sequence of Farmer Jim, inspired by the great American painter Thomas Hart Benton. I just think that it lends itself to genre, cartoons and animation.
FW: One of the most exciting things about The Day the Earth Blew Up’s style is that it blends the classic Looney Tunes cartoon style with more painterly elements like backgrounds and character designs. Why did you want to take this approach to the film’s visuals?
Browngardt: Well, if you think about the classic Looney Tunes shorts, there was a huge span of them. There are over 1000 from the ‘30s all the way to the ‘60s. There’s never like a house style. Every director was kind of making their own film every time with these characters. So, the backgrounds would be different. Of course, there were some artists they went back to, but if you look at the ones in the ‘40s specifically, they’re all so different from each other — the directors and the looks.
I knew I wanted to interject that into the film. The art director, Nick Cross, and the production designer, Aaron Spurgeon, brought that up, too, when we were making it, and thankfully, I had incredible artists who could pull it off. We couldn’t go back in time and have Thomas Hart Benton paint things, but we had artists who could look at their art, put it through their filter, and make it into something.
But I think part of the Looney Tunes brand is just great art and great design and style. So I wanted that to be in the film.
Also, it gives you tentpoles. I knew early on that one of my ideas was to put a short inside the film because of Roger Rabbit, but also because I thought it would be a cool idea. I love Roger Rabbit. It’s a big thing in my development as a filmmaker, an animation lover, and an animation artist. Then Alex Kirwan, the supervising producer, came up with the idea to do that kind of Busby Berkeley art deco look. So, it gives you these little tentpoles to start structuring your film and telling your story, and it also keeps your audience engaged.
FW: So, to address the elephant in the room, The Day the Earth Blew Up could be considered lucky in that it’s getting released, which can’t be said about all Looney Tunes projects. Why do you think Looney Tunes is a franchise that’s still valuable and still connects with audiences?
Browngardt: I think they’re timeless. I think the characters are timeless. The relatability to these characters, the situations that you can write with these characters, the stories you can tell with these characters, and humor you can tell with these characters speak to all ages and cultures around the world. It doesn’t matter who you are, I think you can enjoy them.
You rarely find somebody who goes, “Boy, I hate Looney Tunes.” It’s not something you hear. And I don’t know if I want to be around somebody that says that. But I think they’ve stood the test of time, and I think they’ll be standing more tests of time as time progresses in the future. They’re just so damn entertaining, and they’re so damn timeless.
It’s just sort of magic in a bottle, and it’s daunting to have to go and have this responsibility. But I just go, “Well, this is going to be ours.” We had a little bit of an origin story for Porky and Daffy in there, and I was like, “Oh jeez, I gotta tell the story of these characters,” but then I think every short they were doing something different. They would be babies in one, or they’d be this and that. It resets for these things.
So I didn’t feel like I was messing up canon or something with Looney Tunes. I feel like this is our movie, and that’s it. It is what it is. Somebody else can make a different Looney Tunes movie that’ll be totally different.
The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie screened at the 2024 Animation Is Film festival. It will be released in the United States in 2025.
