Sag Harbor's Peter Browngardt's Makes His First Looney Tunes Feature

Just a few weeks ago, Peter Browngardt, a creator, writer, executive producer and director of animated films, achieved a major career milestone. His first feature-length movie hit theaters across the country — and it stars none other than Porky Pig and Daffy Duck.

Titled “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie,” the new film was released on March 14, and this weekend it will screen at Sag Harbor Cinema, Browngardt’s hometown theater, as part of a special animation weekend.

He couldn’t be more thrilled.

“We are the first original fully-animated ‘Looney Tunes’ film of all time,” Browngardt explained in a recent phone interview from the West Coast. “They have done compilations of old shorts from the ’40s or ’50s and some new animation of Bugs or Daffy introducing them. Then there was the ‘Space Jam’ franchise, which is a hybrid of live action mixed with animation. But they never told a fully original animated story by the Looney Tunes.”

Until now, that is. Not bad for a kid who discovered his passion for all things cartooning while growing up on the East End.

“I find there’s a lot of creativity out of Sag Harbor in general. The area has such a creative history of the arts and creative people. It’s in the air,” said Browngardt, who lives in Los Angeles now. “Having children of my own and them going through schooling, I feel so fortunate to have had Pierson high school. There was always the small town-ness of it and the dedicated program of the arts and music, and dedicated home ec and photography classes. That’s unheard of out here.

“I assumed every school has that, but maybe it was more common in the ’90s.”

Browngardt has been on quite the career trajectory since graduating from Pierson High School in 1997. He earned his bachelor’s degree from CalArts’ Character Animation program, and by the age of 19, was working on the animated science fiction sitcom “Futurama.” He was also involved in projects at Industrial Light & Magic and MTV Animation, and ultimately created his own animated series, “Uncle Grandpa,” which ran on the Cartoon Network from 2013 to 2017. Another series followed, “Secret Mountain Fort Awesome,” for which he won an Emmy and an Annecy animation festival award.

By 2020, he was the executive producer of Warner Bros.’ “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” a series of shorts that ran over six seasons on HBO Max. Along the way, he also created a collection of stamps for the U.S. Postal Service to celebrate Bugs Bunny’s 80th anniversary.

Then he really hit the big time — Warner Bros. came to Browngardt asking if he had any ideas for a full-length feature Looney Tunes cartoon.

“I was doing Looney Tune shorts for HBO Max — we made 209 of them — because of ‘Space Jam 2,’ they wanted to reenergize Looney Tunes, but the pandemic put a damper on it,” he said. “They were happy with the shorts I made. I pride myself on being an animation and cartoon snob and try to work with the best people. I put together a great team of people who were like-minded and talented, and we got recognized.”

Though Browngardt feels that the Looney Tunes characters work best in comic shorts — like Abbott and Costello comedies — he was certain he could develop a full length concept that would work. And even though Bugs Bunny is one of his favorite characters of all time, he felt that with Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, there would be some room for sophistication in their relationship.

“I didn’t want to have the baggage of the hunter/prey kind of thing,” said Browngardt, referring to the recurring run-ins Bugs has with his nemesis, Elmer Fudd. “So I picked up Porky and Daffy and went to the studio, put in a pitch and they went for it with a $15 million budget, which is peanuts compared to other animated features.

In an ironic twist, it turns out that Browngardt happened to be working in Sag Harbor when this film first came to life.

“My wife’s father is an architect, he has an office under Sag Town — Boris Baranovich Architects — he let me work there at a desk,” he said. “I pitched this movie from Sag Harbor and it got green lit in Sag Harbor.

“I had a germ of an idea — what if it was like an Ed Wood movie?” he said. “I work with outlines, not scripts. I came up with a rough idea and then let the cartoonists work it out.”

Browngardt noted that he pitched the film in 2019, and the project was green lit in 2021, right as the business was on the verge of changing.

“At that time, streaming was huge and everything was golden in Hollywood. They green lit it for a streaming movie. It’s different than that now. I don’t think they would do it now.”

By the time the movie was nearing completion in February 2024, a decline in streaming options meant that Browngardt now had to shop the film around and find a distributor to get it in theaters. U.K. based GFM Animation came on to distribute the film internationally in places like Israel, Greece and Germany. They also arranged for the film to be screened at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France.

“It’s a beautiful film festival. I was excited, I brought the film, it was a perfect ceremony everyone was drunk on wine and we killed it,” Browngardt said. “The Hollywood Reporter wrote about it, because of that, Ketchup Entertainment said, ‘We’ll put it out independently,’ and they put some money up for North American theatrical distribution.”

That distribution has included 3,000 cinemas around the country. It turns out “The Day the Earth Blew Up” is unique in the 21st century world of cartoons, as it’s not a CGI-generated film – nor does it play into the flashy standards of 3D animation. Rather, this film is pure 2D, with every single frame hand drawn on tablets.

“Computers can’t hold a candle to it,” Browngardt said.

The film follows Daffy Duck and Porky Pig as they engage in antics at a bubble gum factory and end up uncovering a secret alien mind control plot. The two become heroes when it falls to them to save the town and the world. Because he sees Daffy and Porky as extreme versions of two very different characters, Browngardt felt they gave him some good material to work with in a feature-length setting.

“Porky is a positive, good-natured average man, and it’s great to see that contrast with Daffy. It’s somebody who never wants to do wrong paired with someone who’s sort of a lunatic,” said Browngardt. “We’re taking Daffy and Porky and adding a larger story with a certain sophistication to it, other than exploding stuff. We wanted to not take ourselves too seriously in making a Looney Tunes movie. You’re expecting a certain brand of humor — we do 20 minutes of slapstick and gags. But we have to do more.”

Also joining the cast for this film is Petunia Pig, whose job is to provide a stabilizing note to the frantic energy between Daffy and Porky. In designing the storyline for “The Day the Earth Blew Up,” Browngardt took inspiration from broad comedies, like the Borat movies and “Dumb and Dumber.”

“These are larger-than-life character-driven comedies — they always have a storyline and were not just playing jokes on someone. They were more than just the gags,” said Browngardt who, for his larger theme, opted to pay homage to B-movies of the 1950s, specifically, films involving alien space invaders.

“That’s why the sci-fi elements came in” he said. “Growing up in Sag Harbor, one of my biggest inspirations was Tim Burton as a filmmaker and an artist. He turned me on to his tastes in older films he was influenced by, like the ‘Invasion of the Saucer Men,’ ‘War of the Worlds,’ ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still,’ and ‘Body Snatchers.’

“You can see the influence in his films, so I always loved those as a film genre,” Browngardt continued. “I knew I wanted Porky and Daffy in the film, but I didn’t want noir, so sci-fi felt natural.”

Being tapped by Warner Bros. to make the first-ever Looney Tunes feature film feels like a massive responsibility. When asked how he feels about it, Browngardt responded: “I take it very seriously. l love the fact I was given the keys to the Corvette to take it for a spin. I didn’t want to psyche myself out.

“Every one of the Looney Tunes cartoons started from the first point of the character, which stayed the same,” he continued. “There were four Looney Tunes creators — Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett and early on, Tex Avery. It all comes with his influence which defined the style of humor the most, though they all had their own take on the characters. Chuck Jones’s later ’40s and ’50s shorts are masterpieces. They were experimenting all the time, so why not me?”

One of the major challenges facing Browngardt was finding an actor who could replicate the Looney Tunes voices made famous by the late Mel Blanc, who died in 1990.

“Eric Bauza is a once in a multi-generational voice talent,” Browngardt said. “I actually first cast him in ‘Uncle Grandpa’ and I remembered that between takes, he could do any voice. He’s a master. He started busting out Looney Tunes characters and he was amazing.

“When my career path ended up at Warner Bros., they asked, ‘Who ya gonna cast?’ I said ‘I know who I’m calling.’”

Browngardt notes that though generations of children grew up on Looney Tunes shorts, they were never made for kids.

“They were done a huge disservice when defined as a kids’ medium. It’s actually the most sophisticated and challenging way to bring anything to life,” he said. “They’re for everyone. I wanted it to feel that way, with winks and nods and jokes that go over kids’ heads.”

And now, ‘The Day the Earth Blew Up’ is being shown at the Sag Harbor Cinema, right next door to the building where he first pitched the initial concept.

“I’m so thankful it’s there, because when that fire happened I thought it would go away,” said Browngardt, who is now working as head of story at Aardmann Animation (of “Wallace and Gromit” fame) on a U.K. Claymation show. “I saw so many films there — ‘Crumb,’ ‘The City of Lost Children,’ Cinema Paradiso — who gets that in their little tiny town by the sea?

“It helped shape me as a filmmaker and an artist.”

“The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie” will screen on Sunday, April 6, at 3:15 p.m. as part of “Sag Harbor Cinema’s Animation Weekend.” Browngardt will join the cinema for a live Q&A via Zoom following the screening. Also screening this weekend will be Nick Park and Merlin Crossingham’s “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” “Sauvages” (Savages) from French animator Claude Barras and Barras’s first full-length animated feature “Ma Vie de Courgette” (My Life as a Zucchini). For tickets, visit sagharborcinema.org. Sag Harbor Cinema is at 90 Main Street in Sag Harbor.