Channel Hop: Although Wallace and Gromit are closely associated with The BBC, it's a little-remembered fact that "A Grand Day Out" actually premiered on Channel 4, and the BBC later bought the rights to it when they commissioned "The Wrong Trousers".
The Merch: Shortly after the release of "A Close Shave", companies took note of how merchandisable the characters were, particularly Gromit and Shaun. Plush toys, backpacks, key chains, alarm clocks and figurines are just a small helping of products you can find with their likeness slapped on.
Ben Whitehead increasingly began acting as the voice of Wallace towards the end of the 2000s, most notably in the Grand Adventures series, along with a number of TV adverts featuring the duo and some scenes in A Matter of Loaf and Death. Fortunately Whitehead's voicing is so near to Peter Sallis that most people don't even notice the difference. The only exception was in "Fright Of The Bumblebee", the first game in the Grand Adventures series. As it was Whitehead's first time voicing Wallace, he sounds a little different than he usually does. Fortunately, he seems to have gotten much better as he continues to voice Wallace, especially following Sallis' death in 2017.
In the French dub, Wallace went through several voice actors. Namely, he was voiced by Francis Lax in A Grand Day Out, Gilbert Lévy in The Wrong Trousers and Cracking Contraptions, Yves Beneyton in A Close Shave, and Jean-Loup Horwitz in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and A Matter of Loaf and Death.
The Red Stapler: In the early 1990s, the Wensleydale Creamery in the Yorkshire market town of Hawes was teetering on the edge of oblivion after being closed by Dairy Crest following the privatisation of the Milk Marketing Board (with production of traditional Wensleydale cheese being transferred to a creamery in Lancashire). A management buy-out saved the creamery, but their prospects looked grim ... until Wensleydale cheese received a Shout-Out by Wallace. Noticing the increased interest in their product as a result, the creamery persuaded Aardman Animation to endorse the use of Wallace and Gromit in their advertising, which worked to rebuild Wensleydale into a thriving product worldwide.
Wallace was originally a postman named Jerry, but Nick Park felt the name did not match well with Gromit.
Some of Nick Park's early sketches featured Wallace with a mustache.
Gromit was going to originally be a cat, but nearly every design Park made looked more like a dog, so he just skipped the formalities. Park originally wanted to voice Gromit himself, but then had the idea of Gromit's voice being recorded by Peter Hawkins. The very idea of Gromit being able to talk was dropped entirely when it became evident how expressive he could be through his eyes, ears, gestures of the limbs or body, and his brow. It's unclear if the yelps in A Grand Day Out were provided by Hawkins or not.
Prior to Frontier Developments acquiring the video game rights, Traveller's Tales had created a short animation to pitch a Wallace & Gromit game to Aardman. If TT founder Jon Burton is to be believed, it was this pitch that inspired Aardman to invest in CGI rendering machines, which then lead to such works as Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas.
Write Who You Know: Nick Park has stated that Wallace is loosely based on his father, who also liked to tinker, with a little of his brother, an electrician, thrown in for good measure.
to pitch a Wallace & Gromit game to Aardman. If TT founder Jon Burton is to be believed, it was this pitch that inspired Aardman to invest in CGI rendering machines, which then lead to such works as Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas.