Picture: www.imago-images.de
Thirty-five years after its premiere, “Wallace and Gromit” satisfies our entertainment needs more than ever.
On November 4, 1989, the first “Wallace and Gromit” short film “A Grand Day Out” premiered. Soon, exactly 35 years later, the sixth (!) Wallace & Gromit movie will be released: On December 25, 2024, Revenge Chicken will be broadcast in the UK on BBC One and BBC iPlayer, and It will be launched on January 3 and will be released globally on Netflix in 2025.
That’s reason enough to list some interesting facts worth knowing!
“Wallace and Gromit” was originally written as a college thesis
Nick Park, Peter Lord and David Sproston – pictured at a charity event in 2000.Image: Imagery
The first “Walkers” film began with Nick Park's studies while studying at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, England. For his final project, Parker decided to use clay to animate some of the characters for whom he had designed and written short stories. When Aardman animation studio founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton gave a lecture at the university, Parker took the opportunity to show them his final project. Or at least the part he's done. At this time, Nick had just finished filming the rocket construction process. It took him a year and a half to write just one short section of the script.
Lord and Sproxton immediately realized that Nick's project was too ambitious for his time frame, so they offered him a job at Aardman in exchange for studio time and additional resources to complete his project.
Before Wallace & Gromit, there were Tina Turner and Peter Gabriel made of plasticine
At Aardman, Park initially shot commercials and music videos for Tina Turner and Peter Gabriel. The famous animated sequences in Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer video (1986) were created by the later creators of Wallace & Gromit.
gif: YouTube
Yes, even dancing chicks.
gif: YouTube
And the Tina Turner and Barry White clay figures in the “In Your Wildest Dreams” (1996) video? Yes, and Nick Park:
Gromit is almost a cat
In the original concept, Wallace had a mustache and a flat hat, while Gromit was…a cat. There is another person who is speaking. But Nick Park soon realized that dogs were easier to model than cats, so he changed Gromit's species from his original design.
Also crucially, he made Gromit mute and appear to have no mouth, which also helped in the modeling process. At the same time, he also created the now iconic Gromit look that is world-famous.
Aardman's extra-wide mouth is a direct result of Wallace's love of cheese
With everyone! Cheese!Picture: www.imago-images.de
Speaking to The Guardian, Nick Park said: “When Peter Sallis, the voice of Wallace, first said 'No cheese, Gromit?' I realized I had to make Wallace How wide and 'teethy' the mouth has become.”
“Wallace and Gromit” brings good news to the cheese market
Wallace explicitly does this in the movie “Shaver.” wensleydale As his favorite cheese, sales of the British cheese skyrocketed.
“Lovely cheese, Gromit!”Image source: wensleydale.co.uk
The same thing happened in Stinky bishop In 2005, “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” was released. Cheesemongers said their order volume increased by 500%.
In “The Big Day,” Wallace and Gromit flies to the moon…because it's made of cheese? Why actually?
Although the folkloric theme of the moon being “made of green cheese” is relatively unknown in German-speaking countries, it is widespread in many cultures around the world and has also found its way into children's folklore and modern pop culture. This sentence is used in a proverb to describe gullibility. The phrase comes from a fable about a village idiot who sees the reflection of the moon in water and mistakes it for a round wheel of cheese. Similar themes have existed in folktales from the Balkans and Türkiye since the early Middle Ages.
“Wolf and Fox” ——A widely circulated folk tale.Image: Wikimedia Commons
The folk tale of a clever fox deceiving a wolf was first recorded in mid-medieval literature in the rabbinic fables of the French Rabbi Rachi. “The moon is made of green cheese” became a saying in 16th-century England and has been used as a metaphor for gullibility ever since. So when the family ran out of cheese, Wallace flew to the moon.
Aardman Zoo animals initially ranked first
The first Wallace and Gromit short film premiered on 4 November 1989 at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. At the time, no one doubted that these characters would become Aardman's biggest stars. Nick Park's Creature Comforts, released around the same time, was equally successful. In this documentary about zoo animals, audio of real interviews with unsuspecting nursing home residents is synced with the lips of plasticine figures who are said to be commenting on their lives at the zoo.
Creature Comforts filmed a series of television commercials for British Electricity Company and, in 2003, two television series directed by Richard Gorzowski (who later directed Shaun the Sheep). One Beautiful Day and Creature Comforts were both nominated for Academy Awards in 1990, shocking the public. In the end, “Creature Comfort” won the Oscar for animated short film, but it was “Wallace and Gromit” that won the hearts of audiences. It didn’t take long for the next short film to begin production.
We'll reunite with our old enemies in the upcoming movie
First creepy,…then really scary: Feathers McGraw.Image: youtube
The second “Wallace and Gromit” movie, “The Wrong Pants” premiered on Christmas Day 1993 and went on to win more than 40 film awards. In the film, the audience first learns about Feathers McGraw, an escaped zoo penguin who lives in Wallace's home as a guest but is actually a smart criminal with a murderous reputation. Wearing red rubber gloves and pretending to be a chicken. The most formidable adversary from “Wallace and Gromit” is now back in “Wallace and Growl: Revenge of the Chicken.”
Nick Park never had a dog
Danger! Behind you!Image: Imagery
“Gromit is the only domestic dog I've ever had.”
It's difficult to get along with Americans
Although Nick Park had been working exclusively for Aardman since 1985, in the late 1990s, American studio DreamWorks came on board as a co-producer on the first animated feature, Chicken Run. The film's huge box office success prompted DreamWorks to once again collaborate with Aardman to produce the first feature-length “Wallace and Gromit” movie, “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”
Does DreamWorks want to wear U.S. Air Force insignia on its planes?Image: Imagery
The movie was also a success for DreamWorks. But it is said that there were frequent conflicts between the California studio and the Bristol animators during production. Parker said DreamWorks was trying to gain more creative control to make the humor more palatable to American audiences, while Parker just wanted to do justice to his character. To further complicate matters, DreamWorks is apparently not used to working with characters they don't have the rights to. Parker described the shoot as “not exactly an easy task.”
tragedy
The only thing that helps now is…Image: Imagery
In the early morning of October 10, 2005, a fire broke out in a warehouse in Aardman, destroying hundreds of character models, props and sets, as well as the entire “Wallace and Gromit” exhibition that had just returned from Japan. Fortunately, no one was injured. Just as importantly, all footage has been safely stored elsewhere.
Questions in between
Five shorts and feature films have been released to date; the latest, a sixth film, will premiere in December. So the question is:
Welcome to the Gromit-Verse!
Do you remember “close shave”? Wallace quickly adopted the runaway sheep? after success Knit-O-MaticAfter testing the device on him, Wallace decided: “We'll call him Sean” – a play on “shorn” (= shorn).
Thus was created a movie character who would later almost surpass his creator. Under the direction of Aardman director Richard Goleszowski, Shaun the Sheep was developed into a standalone protagonist and soon threatened to supplant his eponymous character. Shaun has six seasons and 170 episodes, as well as two feature films of his own – The Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015) and The Farm (2019) – as well as two Christmas specials. What's more: Shaun the Sheep's little lambs have their own TV series, “Timmy Time,” aimed at preschoolers.
Do you know what time it is? It's Timmy time! Image: BBC
Also part of the “Walkers” multiverse are the runaway queens from “Chicken Run” and the Stone Age people from “Early Man.” Of course, there are nifty Easter eggs hidden in all of the movies with cross-references to other movies.
Image: Aardman
For example, in the closing credits of Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget (2023), we discover… Feathered McGraw!
So let us look forward to the new film together! Because, hey, let's be honest, 35 years after “Wallace and Gromit” debuted, we need “Wallace and Gromit” more than ever. We all deserve more kindness, right here and now.
“The Revenge of the Beast” – Trailer
