Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Ever since the release of A Matter of Loaf and Death in 2008, the Wallace & Gromit franchise has been all but dormant outside the UK, not helped by Peter Sallis’ retirement in 2010 and passing in 2017, with the Shaun the Sheep spin-off series helping to keep it alive in the interim. To this end, I was surprised and excited when not only was a new feature film, Vengeance Most Fowl, announced to be in the works, but that it was also a follow-up to the 1993 short film The Wrong Trousers, which happens to be my favorite entry. The announcement of Netflix being the distributor was a bit of a spirit breaker, as I do not have a Netflix account, however as the film got closer to release, a series of limited US theatrical screenings came up, with the only local option I had being a one-day showing at an IPIC theater (the same one where I first watched Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions under similar circumstances). After leaping at the chance, I found the wait and effort to have been well worth it, even if it doesn’t quite live up to the original.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Note: This review contains spoilers for Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Following Nick Park’s completion of A Grand Day Out in 1989 as a student short film while working at Aardman Animations, its popularity upon release spawned the Wallace & Gromit franchise, with two additional short films, The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), to follow. As part of a multi-picture deal between Aardman and DreamWorks Animation that included 2000’s Chicken Run, a feature-length Wallace & Gromit movie, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, was released in 2005. However, a number of misguided attempts by DreamWorks Animation to make the movie sell better in America led to Aardman cutting the deal short after the release of Flushed Away in 2006. As a fan of the original Wallace & Gromit shorts since childhood, I was excited to see The Curse of the Were-Rabbit when it first came out, though in both the theater and on home video I, along with my family, had a bit of a mixed reaction to it. A little over 15 years later, we decided to revisit the movie in the spirit of the Halloween season and, while it turned out to be far better than we remembered, it still felt like a part of the series’ British charm was missing.

Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures

Note: This review contains spoilers for Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures.

As a follow-up to Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People (aka SBCG4AP) and to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the Wallace & Gromit franchise in 2009, Telltale Games developed the episodic game Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures. Though I wanted to play this game after I learned about it sometime after release, I will admit that actually getting to play it was not the smoothest experience. Though I bought the series through Telltale’s website, I don’t remember actually receiving the digital or physical game, however I’m not sure how much of it was it being around when they lost the rights to the IP. I then bought the physical collection off of Amazon a few years back, however rather than the US Telltale release I somehow ended up with the two-part UK Mastertronic version instead, which while technically correct was not what I expected (I kept the game anyway because I was just happy to own it), and while it is still playable on Windows 10, the game doesn’t like it when I have both discs installed at the same time.

While I have played the game in full before and liked it, especially Episode 3, I decided to take another look at it after replaying SBCG4AP to see if my opinion held up. After what is my second complete playthrough, I thought it was still good despite some technical issues.