Revealed: the full scale of the culture clash when Wallace & Gromit's producer, Aardman Animations, teamed up with the Hollywood studio Dreamworks in an ill-fated partnership that would come to a premature end despite delivering the joy that was The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. "There is a language barrier that often happens with humour. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was going to be called The Great Vegetable Plot, but market research didn't like it," Aardman's Oscar-winning Nick Park told the latest issue of Radio Times. "The verdict was that 'vegetables are a negative with kids', but of course that's why it's good, and works. It's elevating vegetables. That's how Wallace & Gromit works. It was elevating the uncool and mundane to something big in Hollywood. That's the irony." That's not all. "Then there was the line 'Slow down ... you'll buckle my trunnions,'" said Aardman's creative director, Merlin Crossingham. "They didn't get it. They said, 'What's a trunnion?' Who cares? It's something funny. I don't know what it is. If it sounds good, we're happy to go with it." In Hollywood a trunnion isn't funny. It's what you find in a plastic surgeon's outbox.
