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What A Cartoon Movie! - Looney Tunes: Back in Action
🕑 Added 2025-04-28 04:00:23 +0000 UTCAfter the glorified shoe/Michael Jordan commercial known as Space Jam, we as a people deserved a real Looney Tunes movie. And that sort of happened in 2003, when Joe Dante's Looney Tunes: Back in Action hit theaters—then did so poorly it's a shock the IP remains with us today. This live-action/cartoon hybrid has some of the spark of Roger Rabbit and the director's more notable works, but ended up being the victim of endless executive notes and retooling. What we're left with is surely better than any jam in space, but also a movie that fell very short of its goals. On this episode of What A Cartoon Movie, listen in as we cover the movie that failed to make Jenna Elfman/Bugs Bunny comedies a certified thing.
Our guest for the history segment: Thad Komorowski, animation historian and author of Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story
Comments
Erin MacAllister
When it comes to product placement jokes no one is going to top Wayne's World.
Talking Simpsons
There's a certain stripe of Boomer crank that really hates MST3K, and they REALLY became a vocal minority when the movie covered This Island Earth. (A good-looking film, but goofy AS HELL.) - Bob
Grant
Correction about the Backstreet Boys song: they do in fact have an original 1997 song called "If You Want It to Be Good Girl (Get Yourself a Bad Boy)". The script must have gotten the title wrong. Weird choice for this movie considering it's not one of their big hits, but despite that WB must have been unable to get the rights.
brian bonelli
Speaking of Joe Dante and MST3K, Jonah Ray was on a fairly awkward episode of Dante’s “The Movies That Made Me” podcast back in 2018. Joe starts off the interview by telling the then new MST3K host how much he truly detests the whole show (especially the writing, but ESPECIALLY the puppet interludes), and goes on a rant about their mistreatment of “This Island Earth.” Jonah, to his credit, handles this blunt criticism as diplomatically as one can. I love Joe Dante, but sometimes he can be a bit of an old crank.
Devon Baxter
Once you decided on making an episode on Disney's "Alice in Wonderland," Thad would be a great guest.
Harry Kay
Loved the episode, just wanted to mention as a public service, Dante's five and a half hour epic The Movie Orgy is available not only legally, but for the low, low price of free!* *In that the American Genre Film Archive will allow any theater to screen it for free as long as they don't charge admissions. I had wanted to see it for decades, so last year I took the initiative, rented a theater and made it a community event. It's a great time. Whatever you think a bunch of stoned college students could put together out of whatever they found left around, it's so much better and more coherent than that. Also, very, very funny.
Mickey
I did not expect to see Lucky Boys Confusion in this movie and your reactions to it had me dying. Funny thing about them is that for a BRIEF time in the early 00’s these guys had music in everything from commercials to movies but nobody knew them by name. I was a genuine fan of the band and owned all the albums and I even found a worksheet I filled out as a kid and they were listed as my favorite band 😆 And you know what? They were the coolest guys, one of my earliest tweets was @ the band and they not only responded but followed me on Twitter and they still follow me to this day. This part of the podcast had me full grinned so thank you for that today.
Jeff Allred
Shoutout to Taz on the Atari 2600! My family had that game and it was one of the first ones I remember getting good at!
Colton
To be fair to Henry, I also call him YoSAMite Sam from time to time.
