This is the funniest thing I've seen on TV lately.

I didn't know it was an imported idea until I looked up the website to post that link.
I want to see the British version now.

I highly recommend this to my fellow Americans (and everyone else). I laughed out loud.

FF - I never knew you were American/Stateside-based! Well I never!

I'll take that as a compliment.

Oh good! It kind of was, I suppose.

The British version is funnier- because of the greater variety of accents....

Have you seen the original film, FF? Great stuff, as you would expect from Aardman.

Inca - I started watching it yesterday on the AtomFilms website. I couldn't finish it because I had to do some work. I will watch the rest of it as soon as I have time.

I absolutely LOVE the young polar bear at the very beginning.

FF, did any of the Wallace and Gromit shorts (I think they were all Oscar-winning) get viewed much in the States? I can imagine the humour might not have crossed the pond successfully. It's the same guy (Nick Park) who was behind the Creature Comforts idea - which, iirc, was actually commissioned originally as a series of adverts for British Gas (with homeowners talking about their fuel use).

It was a five minute short, and it was snapped up by the Electricity Board for the series of adverts that made it famous.

Rogin - No, I don't think so, but there was a period of a few years when I didn't watch TV much, if at all. I have heard of W&G, probably from OTF, but I've never seen any of the shorts.

Wallace & Grommet had a small audience in the US before the Wererabbit film. The DVDs have been available and some of previous shows - Wrong Trousers, etc - have been on Cartoon Network, but infrequently.

It reminds me...
I first saw the original Creature Comforts in an animation "festival" at the Williamsburg (VA) Theater (now spruced up and called the Kimball Theatre). In those days, it was known to everyone as the Dogstreet Theater (because it's on Duke of Gloucester Street) and usually showed films that were not in the regular movie theaters with a strong bent toward stuff that college kids, especially sad liberal arts students, would like (they showed MP Holy Grail every October, for example). It would occasionally host live events, like Alan Ginsberg doing a reading.

So they'd frequently show these animation festivals, which were packages of animated shorts that had won a particular award or were from a particular country. And I, as a fan of anything involving somebody drawing pictures or creating sculpture to tell a story, would always go, sometimes twice.

I don't know if these reels are distributed anymore. With DVD and the internet, there are more options for animation fans to see independent stuff without going to a theater. But it was better in a theater.

There was an animation festival that would come to SoCal, called Spike & Mike's Animation Festival. That's where I saw a lot of the early Pixar shorts, and Creature Comforts, though I don't remember ever seeing Wallace & Gromit there. I somehow heard about them, because I asked for the Wallace & Gromit VHS box set (Wrong Trousers, Grand Day Out, and A Close Shave) when I was in high school.

The regular Spike & Mike's festival is gone--they also had a "Sick and Twisted" one that became much more popular.

Rogin the Armchair Fan wrote:

QUOTE:
t's the same guy (Nick Park) who was behind the Creature Comforts idea - which, iirc, was actually commissioned originally as a series of adverts for British Gas (with homeowners talking about their fuel use).

I didn't know that, Rogin, but around the time that Chicken Run came out, they started doing commercials for Chevron gasoline with talking cars.

Spike and Mike's used to come to the Dogstreet Theater as did the Sick and Twisted. I think I saw Creature Comforts in some sort of international award winner festival that also included some very dark stuff from Germany and Russia. Creature Comforts was the only really funny one.

There was also a Canadian festival, highlighted by The Cat Came Back.


One of the American ones here. A variety of accents, although maybe you have to be an American to detect it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDo_vs3Aip4&feature=related

Auf Deutsch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDnKARDfe8M&feature=related

I think there was a rule that every single animation festival had to have Banbi vs. Godzilla in it. I remember a lot of Bill Plympton cartoons, also.