Trivia / A Grand Day Out

• Colbert Bump: When Wallace said "Wensleydale", the creators weren't aware that the real Wensleydale cheese factory was about to declare bankruptcy. The success of the film lead to cheese sales to skyrocket and saved the company.
• Dueling Movies: Oddly enough, with Nick Park's other short, Creature Comforts, which were both up for a 1990 Academy Award for "Best Animated Short." Creature Comforts won. And they were his first two films.
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: Nick Park started creating the film in 1982, as a graduation project for the National Film and Television School. In 1985, Aardman Animations took him on before he finished the piece, allowing him to work on it part-time while still being funded by the school.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: At one point, the story was going to be a children's book.
• Orphaned Reference: The robot cooker's isolated presence is random and unexplained in the final film. It was in the remainder of a large population of characters that would inhabit the moon in the original script (which, as mentioned below, had to be omitted due to time and budget). In the final film, it simply exists, seemingly alone, though its role as a parking meter attendant remains.
• The Red Stapler: Perhaps of the more regarded examples. The last of the creameries manufacturing the centuries-old Wensleydale cheese were teetering on the edge of closure in the early '90s, until they received a chance mention in A Grand Day Out. Noticing the increased interest, the creamery persuaded Aardman Animations to endorse a Wallace and Gromit-branded cheese, which worked to rebuild Wensleydale into a thriving product worldwide.
• Saved from Development Hell: The film began production in 1982 as Nick Park's thesis film, with Park himself doing everything. In two years, he had overshot his budget and deadline, had only finished ten minutes^* The scene of the rocket being built. and was completely broke. Aardman, who were impressed with what he'd completed so far, hired him in 1985 and the film was finished around other projects (most notably Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" video). Peter Sallis recorded his dialogue as Park began to animate it, and when Park rang years later to tell him the film was finally finished, Sallis exclaimed "Oh, it's only taken you six years!"
• Technology Marches On: The "robot" mystifies modern audiences, but it's based on an old coin-operated gas cooker. Rather than getting billed for your gas usage, at one time in the UK you would literally put coins in the appliances or a central meter to pay as you go. Rather than having a meter reader, the utility would collect the coins.
• What Could Have Been: Part of why Nick Park didn't finish the film before getting to Aardman was because his original idea was significantly more ambitious. As he put it:
  "The original story was that Wallace and Gromit were going to go to the Moon and there were going to be a whole lot of characters there. One of them was a parking meter attendant, which was the only one that remained – the robot cooker character – but there were going to be aliens, and all sorts. There was going to be a McDonald's on the Moon, and it was going to be like a spoof Star Wars. Wallace was going to get thrown into prison and Gromit was going to have to get him out. By the time I came to Aardman, I had just started doing the Moon scene and somebody told me, "It's going to take you another nine years if you do that scene!" so I had to have a check with reality and cut that whole bit out. Somehow, I had to tie up the story on the Moon and finish the film."
• Write What You Know: Nick Park's father was a tinkerer. The rocket was based on a used caravan he stripped down to the chassis and re-built as a mobile living room, which the Park family went on holiday in.

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