Wallace and Gromit – The Great Train Chase (1993) [video]

Other history: Nick Park almost lost Wallace and Gromit in a NYC cab in 1996.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/nyregion/07lost.html

Especially sad as the highly elaborate museum set had several more visual gags than we actually get to see in the movie.

I used to work in the building with the turrets you see in the foreground which had a shared wall with that blaze (largest post-war fire in Bristol). Amazingly the building survived because of the astonishing quality of the Victorian stonework. It was an old engineering works where parts of the SS Great Britain were designed. The doorways were > 7 ft high for a cute reason... so the Victorian gents could walk about with their stove-pipe hats on.

... and a TARDIS of a train track box.

Emphasis appear. Someone else mentioned the same thing on Reddit when this video was posted there yesterday. I'll copy my reply to it:

> If you pay close attention to the background you see that it's looping. Near the end when they're about to enter the kitchen you see that the distance from the doorway to the wall is one, two meters at most (er... about 6 to 9 feet?), but then when they enter it you see a cupboard pass by 6 times before Gromit crashes, which basically means that the space has been stretched out six times.

> I think that just shows how much movie magic the scene has: space and time are stretched and squashed to meet the needs of the narrative, reality be damned! And unless you specifically look for, it you'll hardly notice because you're too caught up in the excitement.

Just like how you don't care that there's infinitely many train tracks in that box. It's basically The Rule Of Cool:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfCool

No, it wasn't. I submitted it because it appeared on my social stream as part of Aardman's 40th Anniversary celebrations.

I wasn't aware of that Reddit thread as I seldom visit Reddit.