Farmer Jim had raised Porky Pig and Daffy Duck from the time they were piglet and duckling. He watched them learn how to use massive wooden sledgehammers; wreak havoc on their enemies; and grow into the strapping, strange, anthropomorphic barnyard animals they became.
But now, it’s time for Farmer Jim to leave—making his way to perhaps the Great Beyond, or Albuquerque, whichever comes first. But before he leaves, Farmer Jim gives his two adoptive sons some parting advice.
“The world can be a cruel place,” he says. “But as long as you two stick together, you’ll be all right.
“Oh, and one more thing: Don’t forget to take care of your home.”
Years later, Porky and Daffy have held fast to Farmer Jim’s first bit of advice. The second? Not so much.
To call the house a neighborhood eyesore would be to call nuclear war a minor annoyance. Mrs. Grecht—she of the community’s “annual home standards review’’—would like nothing more than to condemn the place. And while Daffy and Porky can patch up the holes in the stairs with pizza boxes and paint the front yard dirt a nice shade of green, they completely overlook the gigantic hole in the roof—a hole suspiciously edged by a strange, green goo.
Mrs. Grecht doesn’t like that hole. Not one little bit. She tells the pig and duck that unless they get that gaping gable patched in 10 days, she’ll condemn the property and kick them out. But Porky and Daffy don’t have the money for repair: It looks like they’ll have to (gasp) get jobs.
They should be grateful that the community’s gigantic Goodie Gum factory has never been too keen on automation. With a little help from a new friend, Petunia Pig, soon Porky and Daffy get Goodie Gum gigs: Porky must push a button. Daffy must pull a lever. And … that’s it.
“I can’t believe it!” Porky enthuses. “We’re actually working well together! We’ll have enough money to fix our roof in no time!”
“Yeah!” Daffy says. “As long as the plot doesn’t twist!” That, my friends, is known as foreshadowing. As the movie itself tells us.
The plot does indeed twist. Turns out, someone else has an interest in the Goodie Gum factory: A spaceship-driving alien who means to dump a whole bunch of green goo (yes, the same green goo found in the hole in Daffy and Porky’s roof) into Goodie Gum’s newest, much-anticipated flavor. Anyone who chews the contaminated gum will turn into a zombie under the control of said alien. And that can’t be good … can it?
Daffy and Porky certainly don’t think so. They quickly dive into a new effort: saving the world.
That’s nice, of course. Always better to save the world if you have a chance then not save the world, I always say. But it’s not as easy as you think it would be. The drive to save Earth requires sacrifice and bravery. And, most dauntingly, it will force Daffy and Porky to work together.
That’s not easy, as Daffy is the animated personification of chaos. For much of the movie, Porky tries to minimize Daffy’s involvement—causing some hurt feelings. But eventually, Porky accepts Daffy’s daffiest attributes, realizing that they might be, paradoxically, the key to saving the world.
Farmer Jim feels, at times, like a salvific, even godlike figure. He starts out fully human, apparently—but the animation style used for him is strikingly different than every other character we see. And when he literally leaves Porky and Daffy for good, he’s so stiff that he sort of hops into the sunset.
We never see him die, and nor are we told that he did. But Porky and Daffy cry lugubriously at his hopping departure, and they speak of him fondly as one would a beloved dead relative. But we do see Farmer Jim after he leaves—his face appearing in the clouds or on the horizon. If you think about Mufasa’s cloud appearances in The Lion King or Obi-Wan helping Luke during the Death Star trench run in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, you’ll have an idea of how Farmer Jim manifests after his physical departure.
Someone bows to an idol in the shape of a Boba drink.
Porky first sees Petunia in a diner. Daffy, sitting with Porky, sees Porky staring toward the counter and says, “I betcha want a piece of that … that’s some tasty dish!” Daffy then gets up, and Porky thinks the duck’s going to introduce himself to Petunia and embarrass Porky something awful. As it turns out, Daffy thought that Porky was fixated on a piece of pie, and he goes to the counter to order a slice.
But Daffy does introduce Porky and himself to Petunia as he’s ordering, and she becomes a part of their world-saving posse. Throughout the film, we see plenty of evidence of Porky’s infatuation with Petunia, who is a taste scientist (“You can tickle my taste buds any time you want!” he says, adding with a blush, “for science, of course,”). And the two ultimately do kiss and become a couple.
In an imaginative, almost dream-like sequence, we see silhouette versions of Porky and Daffy almost kiss, and their shared mailbox is embossed with their names and a heart. But these elements feel very much akin to classic Looney Tune gags, with no real inclination that the two are attracted to each other. Not. At. All.
Daffy rips off all his feathers at one point, and someone refers to him as being naked. When Porky and Daffy are patching their cement walkway, Porky turns to see Daffy’s bare rear. “Daffy, I said, ‘no cracks,’” Porky says. Daffy pulls up his feathers to cover himself in response. In one moneymaking effort, Daffy shakes his augmented rear to a camera in an effort to become an online influencer. He’s cancelled instead, and we see his buttocks slowly deflate as if they were balloons.
Porky encourages Daffy to get to work laying eggs—and indeed, it seems that Daffy is capable of doing so. But he complains to Porky about just how difficult it is for a male duck to produce them. Mrs. Grecht is well-endowed, and a physical gag or two is predicated on the size of her bosom.
In a nod to Winston Churchill’s famous “Never Surrender” speech, Daffy tells an alien, “Probe us! Subjugate us! Take our dignity! Probe us again! Probe us at home! Probe us on the beaches! On the French Riviera! In truck stop restrooms! At the supermarket! But we’ll never submit to your tyranny! Never!”
When a piece of semi-sentient gum tries to push into Daffy’s own mouth—wrestling with Daffy’s own tongue—Daffy shouts, “I barely even know you!”
Oh, those Looney Tunes. The violence in the franchise’s classic animated shorts make John Wick films look like an exercise in pacifism. We’ll not go into every sledgehammer blow or comic pratfall or unrealistic twisting of someone’s body. Let me just say that it’s a rare moment that doesn’t involve some sort of bit of comic (and curiously harmless) violence. But let me offer a few of the more remarkable instances to be aware of.
The alien’s plot involves semi-sentient gum. At one point, a bunch o’ gum is weaponized—turning into a monster with one eyeball and set of false teeth. It attacks our trio of heroes (Daffy, Porky and Petunia), and for some younger viewers the scene could be a bit scary.
The gum also turns those who chew it into zombies. Those zombies also attack (with glowing pink eyes and slack jaws). But if those zombies are forced to spit out the gum, they return to normal, and the gum can be destroyed via flame thrower.
Daffy lays an egg on a bully during a middle-school-era flashback. Several characters are “exploded,” leaving behind comically charred remnants of their faces. Limbs get chewed in various sequences. Someone’s eyebrows are ripped off. A gigantic asteroid hurtles toward earth. Someone slides across a table full of glassware, and we hear the glass break over several seconds. Heads are squeezed in ways that heads were never designed to be squeezed. A circular floor falls from a great height, rolling like a nickel and ultimately smashing someone underneath its weight. Things go boom (including heads). Someone steps on a LEGO.
In a flashback, we see how Daffy dropped a vase on Porky’s head, causing the pig’s lifelong stuttering issues. Daffy and Porky take a man to the airport via horse and tell him to board the already-taxiing plane via landing gear. “It’s perfectly safe!” Daffy promises. It’s not. Someone slams his head repeatedly in a car door.
We hear two misuses of God’s name. The word “butt” is uttered as well.
The alien-infected gum is an extreme example of a mind-altering substance. As mentioned, it turns its chewers into zombies under control of the alien, and an X-ray shows the gum literally wrapped around the brain of its victim.
Petunia’s experiments in smell and taste can be quite vile, making people gag and spit out whatever’s in their mouths. We see one particularly disgusting concoction used repeatedly.
Daffy can be pretty rude. When Porky and Daffy work as babysitters, a diaper winds up on a baby’s head. As a taste scientist, Petunia tastes some very unusual things. “You lick stuff that should never be licked!” Daffy exclaims at one point.
Sludge pours out of a gutter. Termites eat through a floor. People mock Petunia. And Porky. And Daffy. We hear quite a bit of name-calling. A dog blows a bubble through its anus.
The versions of Porky and Daffy we see here are based on some of the early works of their shared creator, Bob Clampett—called by Cartoon Brew the “looniest of the Looney Tunes directors.” And Clampett’s animation DNA is everywhere here.
If the animated world could be compared to a middle school classroom in the 1930s, Clampett would’ve been the kid in the back row, putting whoopie cushions on the teacher’s chair. Working for Harman-Ising Productions in the 1930s (which would churn out the first Looney Tunes cartoons and be ultimately assimilated by Warner Bros.), Clampett pushed against the gentler Disney-style animation that dominated at the time and churned out cartoons that pushed hard against genre rules and, at times, against good taste, too.
Clampett’s work was funnier, zanier, and far more violent than what folks were used to seeing: His ethos helped shape Looney Tunes and turn its stable of characters—including Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Yosemite Sam and countless others—into the cool upstarts on the animation block. And as Looney Tunes’ wise-cracking, mallet-wielding characters grew ever loonier, some began to see Clampett’s creations especially as less cartoon and more surrealistic art.
We may imagine Bugs, Daffy and Porky to be creations meant for kids, but that wasn’t really the case back then. And it might not even be the case now.
Oh, The Day the Earth Blew Up is PG. And for kids used to that Bugs-and-Daffy brand of slapstick humor, the film contains very few surprises. The content issues here are, for the most part, very much known quantities.
But let us not let nostalgia obscure our understanding that these are, indeed, content issues. Its bathroom humor and wink-wink allusions to sex are nothing new, but they’re not welcome in many a family home. The movie’s violence may be ludicrous, but it is also ever present and, potentially, influential. Trust me: As a kid, I once thwacked myself in the head with an encyclopedia to see if I might actually see stars, à la the Looney Tunes characters. It didn’t work, and it may explain why I’m the way I am today. (Thanks for that, Bob Clampett!)
The Day the Earth Blew Up is funny and smart and incredibly energetic. I think that Clampett and his fellow denizens of Looney Tunes’ famous Termite Terrace would’ve appreciated this contemporary homage to their genre-shaping work. But their legacy is built on plenty of sly elbows to the side and mallets to the head.
And I’d hate for unsuspecting parents to see their own barrage of stars.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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