Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) on Netflix
PG20031h 31mAdventureAnimationComedy
Weary of playing second fiddle to Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck walks off the studio lot. DJ Drake learns his father, spy Damian Drake, has vanished, and Acme wants the Blue Monkey diamond.
- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb5.8/1043,921 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes57%
Trailer
Plot summary
Playing the villain in Bugs Bunny's cartoons has worn Daffy Duck down, so he demands a film of his own. The studio's vice president of comedy, Kate Houghton, fires him instead, and security guard DJ Drake has to escort him off the lot. A chase wrecks the water tower, and DJ loses his job too. Daffy tags along to DJ's house, where a message comes from DJ's father, the actor Damian Drake, who says he is a secret agent. Damian has been taken by the Acme Corporation, and he sends his son to Las Vegas to find his associate Dusty Tails and the Blue Monkey diamond before Acme's Mr. Chairman can. Kate, meanwhile, is ordered to bring Daffy back or lose her own job, so she and Bugs Bunny take Damian's car and give chase.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film began as a straight Space Jam sequel in which Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes would face a new alien villain, Berserk-O!, designed by Bob Camp, with Joe Pytka returning to direct. Jordan refused to come back, and Warner Bros. dropped Space Jam 2.
- Before Joe Dante was hired, Warner Bros. tried two other stars: the project was reworked as a spy film called Spy Jam for Jackie Chan, and the studio lined up a companion film, Race Jam, for racing driver Jeff Gordon. Both were canceled.
- Dante and writer Larry Doyle set out to make the "anti-Space Jam". The director said the studio did not want to know about the characters, down to why Bugs Bunny should not be doing hip-hop, and called the whole thing a pretty grim experience.
- Brendan Fraser invented the joke of his character DJ Drake being the stunt double of a fictional Brendan Fraser, whom he punches, as a dig at the injuries Fraser had suffered doing his own stunts. He said he wanted to mock himself before anyone else did.
- Billy West and Jeff Bennett were first cast as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, then replaced by Joe Alaskey, who re-recorded the lines apart from a few vocal effects such as Bugs's screaming and Daffy's "woo-hoos". West stayed on as Elmer Fudd.
- When Warner Bros. executives grew tired of the jokes, the studio brought in 25 gag writers, among them John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, to write lines short enough to be dubbed into a cartoon mouth. The finished film still carries only one credited writer.
- Every scene with a cartoon character was shot three times: a rehearsal with stuffed stand-in puppets, a take with nothing in the frame, and one with a mirror ball in shot to tell the computers where the light sources were. Fraser found acting opposite the puppets the easier option.
