Popular Culture
Wallace and Gromit have been used in numerous advertising campaigns down the years. The duo were used to promote a Harvey Nichols store that opened in Bristol (where Aardman is based) in 2008. The pictures show them, and Lady Tottington from The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, wearing designer clothes and items. They were also used to prevent a Wensleydale cheese factory from shutting down due to financial difficulties after a member of staff came up with the idea to use Wallace and Gromit as mascots, as Wensleydale is one of Wallace's favourite cheeses.
Wallace and Gromit have also been used as the TV Station Ident for Christmas periods for the BBC, in both 1995 and 2008.
The duo were parodied as Willis and Crumble in an episode of The Simpsons entitled "Angry Dad: The Movie". Nick Park also made a voice cameo as himself in the same episode.
The theme song was used to wake up astronauts aboard space shuttle mission STS-132 in May 2010. It has been suggested on BBC Radio 4's PM that the theme should become the England football supporters' song, instead of The Great Escape main title theme.
In December 2010, while appearing on Desert Island Discs, Nick Park announced that he was working with Pleasure Beach Blackpool to build a theme park ride based on the characters.
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“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)