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.
Read more about this topic: Wallace And Gromit
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“There’s that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)