Bah, Humduck!: A Looney Tunes Christmas 2006

[6.5/10] The biggest problem with Bah Humduck is a simple one -- the Looney Tunes aren’t a good fit for A Christmas Carol. Adaptations from the Muppets, or the Mickey Mouse crew work better, because while there’s a certain zany silliness in both sets, there’s also a streak of earnestness to those characters that you can lean on for a story like the Charles Dickens classic.

But the Looney Tunes have never been about earnestness. If anything, they’re more about taking the stuffing out of it, skewering the happy or sappy parts of pop culture with a take no prisoners comic approach. “Save the treacle for Uncle Walt!” At base, they’re just not built for a story of transformation and redemption like this one.

Now that doesn’t have to be a problem! You can do subversive adaptations of A Christmas Carol and get along just fine. (Hello Blackadder fans!) Hell, the Animaniacs set the blueprint a decade before this film with their amusing “A Christmas Plotz” spoof of the famous tale. A twisted or wild version of the story that leans toward parody and mischief could absolutely work for Bugs and company.

Instead, Bah Humduck plays the core of the story straight for the most part. Sure, the contours of the story are exaggerated for cartoonish effect. Daffy-as-Scrooge isn’t just a miserly grump like his literary counterpart, but rather an over-the-top tycoon whose selfishness is only outstripped by his jerkiness. But the thrust of the journey is the same: seeing his humble beginnings, realizing the error of your ways, and making a compassionate change for the better.

I don’t really buy it. The special does its best to tug at our heartstrings. In lieu of Tiny Tim, Bah Humduck invents “Priscilla Pig”, Porky’s doe-eyed, preternaturally kind daughter. She collects money for the poor, and feels sorry for Daffy despite his jerkiness because he has no family, and offers him personalized cookies and the title of “uncle” by the end of the picture. And it all feels entirely cheap and saccharine.

You get to be a little saccharine in Xmas specials! That’s part of the deal. But Priscilla and her whole deal seem designed in a factory to elicit “awww”s and douse the end of the movie in treacle before the audience knows what hit it. The whole thing feels out of place for the Looney Tunes, and almost entirely unearned.

Maybe I’d feel differently if Bah Humduck didn’t spend the other eighty percent of its runtime doing standard slapstick. I like slapstick! The animation here is solid at worst, and while the gags are derivative of the Looney Tunes shtick fans have seen for decades, the animation isn’t half bad, especially for a mid-2000s DTV release, and there’s a handful of inventive sequences.

And if that’s all this movie set out to do -- use the framework of Dickens’ novella to build a bunch of loony gags around -- I wouldn’t mind. But this special tries to have its fruitcake and eat it too. The writers and animators want to spend the vast majority of their time on enjoyable enough, but fairly empty physical comedy, and then at the very end try to turn this into some touching story of transformation and kindness. The one doesn’t work with the other.

There’s a few exceptions here or there. Oddly enough, Marvin the Martian’s longing for home makes him the most sympathetic character in the special. And as manipulative as the whole thing is, Porky just wanting a doll for his daughter for Xmas is sweet enough. Hell, even baby Daffy at the orphanage, puffing himself in the hopes of being adopted only to find himself left behind once more, comes with some genuine pathos. But all of this is the exception, not the rule.

One of the biggest problems here is that the “casting” doesn’t really work. Daffy has long had a bit of a greedy side, so while he feels a touch out of character as a megalomaniacal CEO, it’s close enough to work. Likewise, Porky as the put upon Bob Crachit analogue has a certain logic to it, even if the movie has to dream up a family and a tear-jerking backstory for him here.

But nobody else really clicks with their “character.” Sylvester is Marley, and outside of a “Sylvester the Investor” pun, nothing about his personality screams “regretful miser.” Granny & Tweety, Yosemite Sam, and Taz play the ghosts of Xmas Past, Present, and Future respectively. Unfortunately, aside from some vague resemblance between Sam and the traditional depiction of the Ghost of Xmas Present, these castings seem random and don’t really tie into the famous literary figures in a meaningful way.

Hell, the only way these spirits “guide” Daffy is by knocking him around, which, while totally in character for the Looney Tunes, does nothing to make Daffy’s ultimate change-of-heart believable. The rest of the usual crew are reduced to random cameos (Road Runner), or Daffy’s beleaguered employees (Elmer Fudd), with no major relevance to the story.

Worst of all, I’m sorry to say, is Bugs himself. He has no real place in the story, but is jammed in there anyway. Bah Humduck could have taken the Muppet Christmas Carol route and made him a wisecracking narrator, a role that would suit him. Instead, he just randomly shows up now and then to tweak Daffy, which, hey, that’s good meat and potatoes Looney Tunes material, but sadly, the creative team can’t find a way to integrate it organically into the rest of the proceedings.

That’s the insurmountable obstacle to this whole thing. You can do a slapstick-filled, Daffy-bashing, Yuletide-themed holiday outing for the Looney Tunes, or you can do a sincere, heartrending rendition of A Christmas Carol, but you can’t do both. What the Looney Tunes does well doesn’t dovetail naturally with Dickens, and what the novel does well doesn’t vibe well with Bugs and friends or their wacky, spoofing energy. This movie is watchable enough, but the Looney Tunes highest and best use is to skewer the classics, not try to earnestly adapt them.

With a work like A Christmas Carol, that has been adapted so many times, across so many eras, in so many settings, it can seem easy to transpose it onto whatever cast and atmosphere you happen to have. But you either have to make the classic story your own, or bend your characters to fit into the narrative. Despite its punny (and repetitively invoked) name, Bah Humduck does neither. Instead, it gives you half an hour of off-the-shelf Looney Tunes hijinks, only to try to tug your heartstrings for the last ten. Call me a Scrooge, but I’d rather see Bugs and Daffy doing their usual thing in a wintry setting, rather than watch them shoehorned into a story where they don’t belong.