Making “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie” was no small task for Peter Browngardt as the original Looney Tunes cartoons meant so much to him growing up. “They sort of formed me as an entertainer and an animation artist. They are the greatest animated comedy shorts ever made,” he tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: Film Animation panel (watch the video interview above). What proved challenging was taking the characters and putting them into a 90-minute story. “The whole time you had to add some emotional story to Porky and Daffy, the stars of our film, so an audience can invest in it for that amount of time. You’re trying to honor their personalities and who these characters are from the past but also trying to expand them.”
“The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie,” will be distributed by Ketchup Entertainment. It focuses on Porky Pig and Daffy Duck and how they are forced to find work at a bubblegum factory in order to fix their old and dilapidated house. The duo soon discover that the gum is being manufactured by an alien race seeking to use mind control techniques for world domination and the pair, along with Petunia Pig, are the only ones who can stop it. The film stars the vocal talents of Eric Bauza, Candi Milo, Laraine Newman, and Peter MacNicol.
Browngardt also really enjoyed getting to work with MacNicol, who provided the voice of The Invader and turned out to be a huge animation fan on his own. “He’s an animation art collector. We found out while we were working with him which was really cool. He got the medium and the what to do and how to bring your performance up to animation, especially for Looney Tunes.” Browngardt particularly loved being able to take storyboards and pitch them to him before he performed “It was fun to sort of take some visual cues of how to take the performance and then sometimes he would just go off and do his thing and we found wonderful things in those takes as well.”
Browngardt has been working in various roles in animation for over 20 years. He was the creator of “Secret Mountain Fort Awesome” and “Uncle Grandpa” on Cartoon Network before leading the recently revamped “Looney Tunes Cartoons” and “Tom and Jerry Special Shorts.” He’s been nominated for two Emmys in the Best Short-Form Animated Program category: “Uncle Grandpa” in 2010 and “Clarence” in 2013.
