The winter of 1995 was a decisive one. It seems like a hundred years ago but it marked the start of a new era in filmmaking which would enrapture audiences and enrich studios. It was the year of the vital epochal change from “cartoon” to “animation”—famous, household-name Hollywood stars would voice the characters; story, rather than goofiness, would be paramount. It was the winter when Pixar Studios released “Toy Story.”
People of my generation, Gen-Xers, are reasonably reputed to bore the pants off Millennials by reminiscing about children’s television programs from our youth. Usually the question is phrased, “You don’t remember [insert name of program here]???!!!” followed by a gasp and an abrupt turn to another handily available nearby Gen-Xer for a reassuring smug smile at the sheer scale of the younger person’s loss. Given that Gen-X struggles to remember the nineteen-seventies—when all the interesting things happened—there isn’t much else we can fall back on to make us feel good about ourselves. Some of our trophies—like “Scooby-Doo”—have been remade as cartoons, recast as live-actor motion pictures, or have lines which seeped into common parlance like “(I would have gotten away with it—if it weren’t for those) meddling kids.” Others are less distinct, even for us, forming a kind of gelatinous sugary bowl of Cheerios or Frosties or Cocoa Pops which we comfort ate while binging on Saturday-morning cartoons in the days before Channel Four (1982), let alone streaming and the hand-held tablet. “Looney Tunes,” like “Tom and Jerry,” fits neatly into this second gooey group. It does remain my first memory of Warner Brothers, who have released “Looney Tunes: The Day The Earth Blew Up,” which is showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, and which is more remarkable for its historic record than for its (un)likely appeal to Millennials. For some Gen-Xers, only the Daffy Duck half of the comedy duo of “unkempt barn animals”—the other half being Porky Pig—is imprinted sufficiently in that pre-teen memory to be recalled fifty years later.
In any event, a scientist (clues: librarian glasses, white coat, loosened tie, book titled “Very Advanced Astrophysics”) spots a U.F.O. “coming at the Earth with incredible velocity.” Already the drawing, language, props, story and believability is all very non-Pixar. It is even further away from “Ne Zha 2,” a Chinese animation, which I reviewed in April. Then a time-warp spirits us back to “Many years ago…” (when Gen-Xers were born). Daffy Duck generously and happily smears butter (clues: rectangular container filled with yellow substance, “BUTTER” in big letters) along the bannisters and pushes Porky Pig backwards down from the upstairs landing to the ground floor. “That is one loony duck,” the farmer who owns the house says. Daffy spits and slops and slurs and lisps away. He has an elongated beak and long, wistful, oval-shaped eyes. He has mastered the Hollywood art of tears-on-demand, but they sputter into the air around his face rather than rolling down his chin (so does sweat, which appears just as frequently). His mouth can upturn and downturn to quite a magnificent degree and he smiles to reveal perfect Hollywood teeth. He sleeps in a banana-shaped bath—in lieu of an available lake—in the same room as Porky. The two are due to meet a “home standard inspector,” and begin by cleaning up the breakfast cereal from the kitchen floor upon which a multitude of delighted birds are feasting chirpily. But the comically exaggerated dastardly inspector (her bust is so big that she has to squeeze it into her seventies-style motorcar) notices a huge hole in their roof—oops—and gives them ten days to fix it. They need a job; fortunately Porky finds a porcine girlfriend, a flavour scientist at the local chewing-gum factory, who procures them work on the production line; from his job pulling a lever to squash gum into identical packets, Daffy sleuths a saboteur (the mad scientist) contaminating the world’s gum supply with green goo. One short sequence here is an exemplar for the whole movie: as the female pig looks down, apparatus of the kind seen in a high-school chemistry laboratory magically appears—the desk fills with Bunsen burners and rubber bungs and pipettes and conical flasks and bubbling liquids. Daffy is incinerated to a crisp—but returns seconds later to his normal self. Luminescent colours infiltrate the screen (regular gum—pink; evil-alien goo—green; infected-earthlings’ eyes and tongues—also pink). It must have been such fun to make. And, despite an aside from the alien commander that “you two have chewed me over for the last time,” in the end “that duck actually pulled it off!”
Updated for the mid-twenty-twenties, the pair try to make money by becoming “influencers”—“you’re cancelled,” their mobile phone says. Later, as the U.F.O. appears in the sky, a concert of mobile phones records the moment for posterity, and a breaking-news channel flashes “asteroid set to annihilate world today.” Porky refers to Daffy as a “conspiracy theorist.” But it is the rear-view mirror to which the film returns, with its slapstick and exaggeration and utter unbelievability.
While zany, circus-like and supposedly random, “Looney Tunes” is ideas heavy and built very skilfully indeed. One pivotal component is the full, busy, densely layered, symphony-in-one-movement classical score—fiendishly complex to perform, requiring split-second timing if it is to accentuate the hammy, hyperactive, cartwheeling gestures of the visual experience. (There are neat additions such as the Bryan Adams song “Look Into My Eyes” during a close-up of Daffy’s sad, hypnotic eyes.)
Daffy’s favourite instrument seems to be a hammer bigger than him which he wields willy-nilly. The whole cartoon is about as subtle. When we Gen-Xers next mention children’s television, please suggest we buy a popcorn and watch “Looney Tunes” and take ourselves a bit less seriously. Near the end, after he has been perched for a good while on top of a straw nest, Daffy asks, “Do you know how hard it is for a male duck to lay eggs?”
Adam Poole
8th February 2026
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