DON’T TELL ME IT’S NOT WORTH TRYING FOR [530]

I had been waiting to see the Looney Tunes film “The Day The Earth Blew Up” for longer than I realised, so I was surprised to find my local cinema had already been showing it for a week.

The Looney Tunes characters have become to Warner Bros. what the Muppets are to Disney: a well-loved and historic franchise subjected to multiple reboots in search of nostalgia, relevance or both, before ultimately finding success by just letting it do what it does. The revival of “The Muppet Show” on Disney+, a one-off special with the possibility of further episodes, proved the formula still works if given a confident script and the right special guests, while the latest “Looney Tunes Cartoons”, running on HBO Max from 2020-24 and headed by Pete Browngardt, returned their characters to the hellzapoppin’ era of the 1930s and 40s, inspired by director Bob Clampett. “The Day the Earth Blew Up”, directed by Browngardt, extends this series from 3 to 10-minute shorts to feature length, and proves that all you need to do is let the characters breathe.

Originally conceived for a release to Cartoon Network and HBO Max in 2022, “The Day the Earth Blew Up” instead received a theatrical premiere in June 2024, and has slowly been released around the world since then. Distributed by Vertigo Releasing in the UK, with little or no advertising, I am watching a film that has already received a home video release in other countries.

“The Day the Earth Blew Up” begins with both an asteroid and a UFO hovering into view, the latter crashing through the roof of the film’s stars Porky Pig and Duck (both voiced by Eric Bauza). They were adopted as babies by the Mufasa-like “Farmer Jim”, who instils them with the belief that, so long as they stick together, they will be responsible. However, with their house now in peril, they need to find work for the first time, inexperience and irresponsibility limiting them to push-button work at their town’s bubble gum factory. Porky and Daffy encounter Petunia Pig, (Candi Mylo), an eccentric scientist at the factory in search of the perfect flavour, and whose initiative is needed when Daffy discovers that goo from the UFO has been dumped into a gum that is being relaunched, putting consumers under the control of The Invader (Peter MacNicol), who wants a bubble blown around the world.

The one thing I loved about the new “Looney Tunes Cartoons” was the return of Daffy Duck to his original characterisation. Instead of being a scheming foil for Bugs Bunny, Daffy is instead unpredictable and uncontrollable, to his and others’ detriment. Porky Pig, instead of being a foil to Daffy, is now the nominally responsible one, the Hardy to Daffy’s Laurel, acting as the conscience for the pair. With Porky’s attention swayed by Petunia, and with Daffy destroying her more practical plan for defeating The Invader, both friction and literal tears will come before Porky and Daffy realise how they can complement each other, and save the world together.

The twist that The Invader is also trying to save Earth – the bubble gum was meant to bounce the oncoming asteroid away from harm – was a good idea, although I did find it a little forced that The Invader didn’t make his intention known earlier in the story, unless you reason that the bizarre scheme of blowing a bubble around Earth could only be done by force, let alone an alien travelling across galaxies to drink Boba tea.

The “Looney Tunes” characters already work across a feature-length running time, as proved so many times, but I don’t know if “The Day the Earth Blew Up” will herald more. There was meant to have been “Bye Bye Bunny”, a Bugs Bunny musical film, but this had been cancelled, with Eric Bauza having recorded dialogue and songs for it. Notoriously, “Coyote vs. Acme”, a live-action and animation hybrid to be released in August 2026, was shelved three years earlier for Warner Bros. to obtain a tax write-off, before allowing its producers, Warner Bros. Animation, to find another distributor for the film, much as it has done with “The Day the Earth Blew Up”. 

Perhaps the prospect of more Looney Tunes output in 2027, including a revived “Bye Bye Bunny”, should be taken as recognition by Warner Bros. of the true value of their franchise. Of all their characters, only Porky, Daffy and Petunia appear in “The Day the Earth Blew Up”, so there should be plenty of opportunity for other characters to get their own spotlight.

WHAT AM I TO DO [311]

It takes inspiration and vision to turn an error into a moment of serendipity, but instances of an error supplanting that which didn’t need replacing are rarer still. It was harder than I expected to compile a list of cases where a fix occurred where there wasn’t a problem, but I found more examples than I expected.

 

The following is a list of items, and people, that received their names by accident. In all cases, they were already known under a different name when the accident occurred. A decision will have been made to keep the mistake made, or no subsequent attempt was made to correct the mistake.

 

1) Cilla Black: Best known as presenter of ITV entertainment shows “Blind Date” and “Surprise Surprise,” and for her initial career as a singer – the best-selling song by a female artist in the 1960s in the UK was her version of “Anyone Who Had a Heart” – Cilla Black was born Priscilla White, first performing under the name “Swinging Cilla” at the Zodiac Club in Liverpool, following a few unplanned performances at the Cavern Club, where she worked in the cloakroom. Her surname was flipped into negative in 1961 by the local music newspaper “Mersey Beat,” a name that turned a scene into a genre. Its publisher, Bill Harry, made the mistake. Cilla Black signed with manager Brian Epstein in 1963, having seen her perform with The Beatles, and then on her own.

 

2) Ovaltine: To my knowledge, I have never drunk Ovaltine, but only because it sounds like I would still prefer hot chocolate. A flavouring product made of malt extract, whey and sugar, with cocoa for taste, Ovaltine is added to milk to make what is traditionally a bedtime drink in the UK, alongside the similar Horlicks. The drink originally also contained eggs, and is still known in its birthplace of Switzerland and elsewhere under the name Ovomaltine. However, the name change for the UK was made long before eggs were removed from the recipe – it was a spelling mistake on the trademark application, contracting the name down.

 

3) Lew Grade: A talent agent and TV executive whose companies, ATV and ITC, were associated with everything from “Crossroads” and “Thunderbirds” to “The Muppet Show” and “Jesus of Nazareth”, Lew, Baron Grade of Elstree entered showbusiness as a professional dancer. Born in Russia as Lev Winogradsky in 1906, moving with his family to the UK at the age of five, “Louis Grad” was the name he danced under, until a typing error in a Paris newspaper report added a vowel. The name “Grade” was also used by his brother Leslie, also a talent agent, and passed to his nephew Michael, who later ran BBC One and Channel 4. However, Lew’s other brother, Bernard Delfont, originally also a dancer, continued to use his own stage name to distinguish himself from his brothers.

 

4) “Ye Olde…”: This is a case of a term being used for effect, when everyone knows it is wrong. The English language as written in the years until the post-Tudor period continued to use the letter “thorn” where we would use the two letters “th”, making “the” into “þe”.  The first printing presses often substituted the thorn for “y”, which more closely resembled how most people wrote it, especially when Gothic type made it resemble a closed þ. Now, the y sound of “ye” is deliberately, and incorrectly, used and pronounced retroactively to evoke an old-time period where it was never used.

 

5) The Hindu-Arabic Number System: The Persian mathematician Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī wrote a treatise in around 825 AD titled, in modern English, “On the Calculation with Hindu Numerals”. Three centuries later, it was translated into Latin as “Algoritmi de numero Indorum” – “Algorismus on the Indian Numbers” – giving the author a Latinised name. Alongside the work of the Italian mathematician Fibonacci, the treatise served as the introduction of “Arabic numerals” to the West, e.g. 0 and 1-9, but it became known as “algorism” or “algorithm”, using the “originator’s” name to describe a type of arithmetic, instead of just using a word like “arithmetic.” As this number system became dominant, to the point of no longer needing a distinguishing name, the word “algorithm” would later be applied to definitions relating to computer instructions.