The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie – I kind of wish I’d seen this at the theater, since we don’t get a whole lot of traditionally animated features these days. And Warner Bros. seems to be trying to distance itself from the Looney Tunes for some reason, even though they’re the main thing I think of when I hear the name. There was a lot of backlash to the Wile E. Coyote movie that was shelved for a tax write-off. I’m not entirely sure why anyone would get a tax write-off for making something and not releasing it, but rich people can get away with a lot. I understand it now has a distributor. Anyway, this movie stars Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, who in this continuity were brought up by a farmer, who eventually died and left them his house. The house fails inspection due to the roof having been destroyed by alien slime, so the two of them try to make enough money to pay for repairs. At a diner, they meet Petunia, who here is a nerdy scientist who is obsessed with creating new flavors, and whom Porky is immediately attracted to. And, at least as far as I noticed, these three were the only classic characters to appear, without even any cameos, although there were plenty of references. Daffy also had more of his older characterization, when he was hyperactive and jumped around a lot.

A montage of Porky and Daffy failing at various jobs is presented in the style of an old cartoon short, and there’s a traditional gag with someone in the audience reacting to what’s going on.

The main plot involves an alien creating a gum that turns people into zombies, which Daffy tries to warn everyone about, but nobody believes him. He eventually convinces Porky and Petunia, and they use one of the latter’s gross flavors to try to cure everyone, but there’s some tension when Porky thinks Daffy will mess everything up. It’s interesting that they used a plot involving aliens (well, one alien) when that was also what they did with Space Jam, but it plays out very differently.

Star Wars Rebels – I’m slowly trying to work my way through the Star Wars television shows, roughly in chronological order in-universe. The title made me expect something sort of like The Clone Wars that told stories about a lot of different characters taking part in the latent Rebel Alliance, but instead it focuses mostly on a small cast of original characters, the crew of a ship called the Ghost. Ezra Bridger is a street kid from the planet Lothal who has some skill with the Force, and he’s trained by the former Jedi Kanan Jarras, who has feelings for the captain, the Twi’lek Hera Syndulla. The graffiti artist Sabine Wren is from Mandalore, because that planet apparently has to feature in every SW property these days. The Lasat Zeb Orrelios reminds me somewhat of Wrecker from The Bad Batch, being a boisterous, destructive kind of guy who gets on well with the younger crew members. He’s also quite fond of the exclamation “Karabast!” And Chopper is an argumentative astromech droid. Interestingly, when C-3PO makes a brief appearance, he insists that Chopper is better at his job than R2-D2. Several other familiar characters make appearances as well. At different times, Ezra teams up with Darth Maul and with the pirate Hondo Ohnaka, who’s totally selfish and untrustworthy, but takes a liking to the boy. Grand Admiral Thrawn, an ingenious military strategist who was quite popular in the Expanded Universe, has been transferred to an earlier time period. Kanan dies towards the end of the series, but it’s revealed in the last episode that he and Hera had a child, so I guess humans and Twi’leks are genetically compatible.