YMMV / Wallace & Gromit

aka: The Wrong Trousers

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• Adorkable: Wallace is a childish, socially inept Bungling Inventor whose positive attitude and well-meaning nature nonetheless make an impression.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Wallace. A good-natured simpleton with a genuine passion for tinkering, or a Lazy Bum who wants machines to do all his menial tasks for him?
• Awesome Music:
  • Just try to hum that bouncy and iconic theme song without getting it stuck in your head.
  • The entire score of "The Wrong Trousers" is a huge step up from the synthesized music from "Grand Day Out". It has a great horror feel to it, with the exception of the Train Chase sequence, which is set to comical ragtime.
• Common Knowledge: Most people describe Gromit as a mute who can't make any sound at all, completely ignoring the evident fact that he quite clearly makes some vocalisations in the earlier shorts:
  • In A Grand Day Out, he can be heard snoring when he falls asleep while trying to look for a place to go for the bank holiday, and lets out a yelp when he gets flung off the spinning drill.
  • In The Wrong Trousers, he grunts a few times as the Techno-Trousers jerk him along on his walk with them, and growls when Wallace proudly declares Feathers McGraw as their paying guest. In defense of the latter, though, it's admittedly quite hard to notice the first few times, as it's underneath Wallace's chuckling.
  • In A Close Shave, he barks at Wallace a few times when trying to get him to see he's finished cleaning the windows on Wendolene's shop.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: A large number of neurodivergent viewers interpret Wallace as autistic. Such readings stem from his love of cheese and engineering (which are easy to read as special interests), his lack of social skills with other humans (including verbalization problems when around love interests), his highly consistent daily routine that Gromit is able to predict, his tendency to repeat words and phrases, especially when stressed, and his tendency to shake his fists at chest level when excited or otherwise emotional (which is easy to read as stimming).
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Shaun the Sheep from "A Close Shave", to the point he got his own series in 2007. Shaun the Sheep in turn had its own Ensemble Dark Horse in the form of Timmy the lamb, who got his own kiddy series, Timmy Time, in 2009.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While Wallace & Gromit are cultural icons in their native UK, they’re quite popular pretty much everywhere else. Though there are some notable examples:
  • The series is quite popular with the French, who enjoy the quirky British humour.
  • It's also quite a hit in Japan, even having an advertisement with them in it.
  • And, of course, in the United States, which lead to their brief partnership with DreamWorks Animation. In fact, barring Preschool Shows like Peppa Pig or Thomas the Tank Engine; Wallace and Gromit is probably one of American kids' first exposures to British pop culture. Curse of the Wererabbit even won the Academy Award for best animated film in 2005, one of the only three non-American animated films to do so.^note The other two being Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron in 2002 and 2024 respectively.
• Growing the Beard: "A Grand Day Out" is far from bad, but it's far more surreal than the later episodes, Wallace's only invention is the rocket, there's little of the trademark wit and wordplay, and the "bad guy" is merely misunderstood and takes the form of a... robot oven. With The Wrong Trousers, Wallace became far more of a tinkerer, Gromit became the archetypal Silent Snarker, the dialogue grew much cleverer and sillier, and the series received a massive Animation Bump.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: At one point in "The Wrong Trousers", Gromit spies on Feathers by hiding in a cardboard box.
• Magnificent Bastard: "The Wrong Trousers": Feathers McGraw is a penguin who imitates a chicken while committing robberies. Taking advantage of Wallace's hospitality, Feathers drives Gromit out of the house by making him think he's being replaced and then traps Wallace in the reprogrammed electronic trousers that Wallace gave Gromit as a birthday present and runs him wild through the town. Feathers then uses Wallace to steal a diamond from the museum and when confronted by Gromit with a rolling pin, pulls a gun on Gromit. Feathers then narrowly escapes during a harrowing pursuit on a train set while nearly outsmarting Gromit at every turn.
• Memetic Badass: Wallace himself, for certain corners of the internet. Fans love to inject him as the obvious winner to hypothetical "which of these characters would win in a fight" questions, in matchups with characters like Thanos or Goku◊.
  • There's also a video by HourofPoop which inserts Wallace into fight scenes as Darth Sidious.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Wallace's love for cheese is rather memetic for the fandom.
  • "what the fuck did you just bring upon this cursed land"
  • This particular set of videos named The Quest for Cheese that words cannot explain and you have to watch for yourself. It is insanely quotable.
    "I'm not dabbing, I'm looking at the floor for cheese!"
  • From Wallace & Gromit in Project Zoo: "I'm gonna speak to the authorities about this."
  • "No crack Gromit! We've forgotten the crack!"
  • "I'm not a fruitcake, am I, lad?"^Explanation Wallace saying this line and Gromit replying with a sympathetic hand on the shoulder from A Matter Of Loaf And Death has become a meme on Tumblr, partly or mostly due to misunderstandings with the slang; in British slang, it means someone who's an eccentric or a weirdo, in American slang, it means a Camp Gay man.
  • The Gromit Mug.^ExplanationOriginating from this meme◊ about having to share a Gromit-shaped mug being the sole downside to getting married, fans have treated the cup like it's Serious Business and in some cases used it as a symbol of rocky married life.
  • "Oh, you got to put some swaz on it, Gromit! Top bins!" ^ExplanationA quote from a "the video ends when we cringe" video on TikTok, in which one of the contestants says the line in imitation of Wallace and successfully gets the others to cringe, ending the video. The line - referring to kicking a football into the roof of the net - has been commonly dubbed over footage of spectacular goals, Epic Fails, and of course, the scene in Cracking Contraptions where Wallace actually plays football. It's often edited with a loud bang before "Top bins!" to emphasize whatever's happening in the video.
  • M to the Cheese^ExplanationA Garry's Mod animation of Wallace singing a parody of the song M to the B. It has become something similar to a Rickroll among fans.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Feathers crossed it when he pulled a revolver on Gromit and attempted to fire it at him and Wallace while trying to escape with the diamond he stole. He gets worse in his return in Project Zoo, in which he enslaves zoo animals into powering his diamond-making machine by imprisoning their babies in cages and placing them in dangerous environments such as over pits of spikes or lava pools.
  • Lord Victor Quartermaine is willing to kill the Were-Rabbit (even though he knows it's really Wallace, and even more so than ever because of it) just so he can marry Lady Tottington for her fortune.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: As mentioned on the trivia page, news stories of Nick Park accidentally leaving props from A Close Shave in the back of a New York taxi in 1996 are the main reason anyone in America heard of the series, let alone made it popular, in the first place.
• Sacred Cow: Given they were a lot of people's introductions to Stop Motion and as such formed a huge part of many fans' childhoods, criticizing the shorts online is not a good idea.
• Signature Scene:
  • The Wrong Trousers has the model train chase, especially the part where Gromit lays out the track from the front of the moving train.
  • Gromit turning his sidecar into a plane in A Close Shave.
• Tough Act to Follow:
  • "The Wrong Trousers" is near-universally considered the best in the series, with A Close Shave and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit following closely. A much bigger example is the short's villain, Feathers McGraw, who's considered such an iconic character that none of the succeeding villains, while not bad, aren't anywhere near as well-remembered.
  • Nick Park himself stated he was unwilling to make further projects for the mere sake of continuing the series, wanting each one to at least try matching up the previous and testing new boundaries. He also stated his unwillingness to make new projects without the now deceased Peter Sallis, feeling fans wouldn't accept a soundalike. It seems he has since changed his mind however, as he would go on to announce a new movie slated for 2024.
  • After Sallis retired from acting (and later passed away), fans have been divisive over Ben Whitehead taking over as the voice of Wallace in many special features and advertisements (even if many will admit he has gotten much better as time has passed).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Some of the best stop-motion character animation ever is in these shorts.
  • The famous "track laying" scene in "The Wrong Trousers" is one long display of the most mundane practical effect ever: pushing the puppet slightly as the camera takes an exposure to create a believable and, more importantly, real motion blur effect. And it looks amazing!
  • From the same short, the rather mundane but extremely well-done special effects of Gromit pouring a cup of tea, and jam splattering onto a piece of toast in mid-air. All done completely with stop-motion, and no computers!
  • Even more mundane: Gromit's knitting is all real, done with toothpicks.
• The Woobie:
  • You're sure to feel sad for poor Gromit when he feels so pushed out by the manipulative Feathers that he has no choice but to run away from home.
  • Wendolene in "A Close Shave", having been forced take part in Preston's sheep rustling and is wracked with guilt when he frames Gromit for the crime. Then her canine companion turns on her too, nearly feeding her to the same machine as the rest of the sheep. It's only after the efforts of Shaun and Gromit that she's free from her terror.
  • Fluffles in "A Matter of Loaf and Death", being owned by an abusive master not afraid to physically hit her if she steps out of line and being forced into an accomplice for murder. Luckily, things do get better for her thanks to her budding relationship with Gromit.

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