Intergalactic basketball aside, “Looney Tunes” stories don’t take the form of feature films all that often. Beginning in the ‘30s and really hitting their stride in the glorious color animation of the ‘40s and ‘50s, the Warner Bros. cartoons have certainly stretched the bounds of what’s possible in 8-11 minutes, from full opera spoofs to fourth-wall-breaking experiments. The longer the runtime, though, the more chance there is to build a deeper connection to these iconic characters.
That is what Eric Bauza, the voice of Porky Pig and Daffy Duck in “The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie,” hopes will happen between all the alien invasions and furious home repair in the new Warner Bros. animated film. And that is why, even though he has voiced a small legion of Looney Tunes before, Bauza wanted to keep the spirit of Mel Blanc, who originated many of the Looney Tunes voices, front and center.
Blanc replaced Joe Dougherty as Porky Pig “Picador Porky” all the way back in 1937 and went on to portray Bugs, Daffy, Tweety, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, the Tasmanian Devil, and Elmer Fudd, among others — it’s not for nothing that Blanc earned the title “Man of a Thousand Voices.” Bauza is only one of a handful of actors who’ve gotten to attempt the sufferin’ succotash of voicing Looney Tunes since.
“It always starts with Mel — and hopefully I will always stick the landing with Mel,” Bauza told IndieWire. “There hasn’t been anyone, including myself, that has ever hit it on the bullseye [since]. There’s always going to be nuances and differences and you just can’t help that. But what you could try to do and what I always try [to] incorporate into my performances with these characters is that feeling of the joy that I had sitting with a big bowl of cereal on Saturday mornings with my family, watching these cartoons.”
There are some concrete ways that Bauza and the voice cast of “The Day the Earth Blew Up” all get that little bit closer to Blanc, though. The voice actor can effortlessly switch back and forth between his Porky and Daffy on a dime, but doing it for laughs in the middle of an interview is very different from doing it for hours in a voiceover session. He and director Peter Browngardt were very strategic about giving him one protagonist to focus on at a time.
“Why not dedicate time to each character, each line? You know, usually in sessions we’ll do three takes per line. Having to do that is already an arduous task and then having to adhere to notes, and then having to do it again, and then they animate it and they have to redo it [based on the animation]. So it took a long time,” Bauza said.
It also takes a lot of conversation and collaboration to ground Bauza and his fellow voice actors in the reality of a given scene, even if that scene is about using proprietary bubble gum to blow up an asteroid. Proximity, between characters and between a character and the camera, matters. Emotional intention and intensity matter. The blocking of where characters are in a scene matters.
And in order to preserve Bauza’s voice, the order in which he recorded also mattered. “Recording Porky first and Daffy second is very helpful. Porky is a lot less strenuous on my voice than Daffy is, because Porky’s a little bit more shy and timid and he’s not inclined to yell at people. Although he does lose his temper in this movie,” Bauza said. “Daffy is at like an 11 all the time. He starts at the top of the dial and then goes around the dial. There is no subtlety to Daffy.”
There are plenty of subtle nods to “Looney Tunes” history throughout “The Day The Earth Blew Up,” however; Bauza even does his best impression of Mel Blanc’s natural speaking voice in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo near the end of the film. The whole team’s effort is not only proof of the experimental play and irreverent, alive visuals that 2D animation is so good at, but Bauza hopes it will be proof that these iconic characters still deserve a place as part of our Saturday mornings.
“If people were bitter about [“Coyote vs. Acme”] they should be very happy that this one is even coming out at all. In fact, you know, what do I know? I’m just the cartoon duck, but I would imagine if this one does well, then we might see other movies or new movies. So I just hope that people don’t lose hope and that this movie will be a reminder of why we love them in the first place,” Bauza said.
