Wallace Hammering

About

Wallace Hammering refers to a shot from the stop motion animation short “Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out” by Nick Park. It is a simple sequence of Wallace flailing his arm with a hammer to pound in an undefined object out-of-shot (presumably a nail). It is a popular source for remixes and extended variants on YouTube, and is commonly used in gif-caption format.

Origin

“Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out” is a stop-motion short created by Nick Park of Aardman Animations in 1989, and the first entry in the Wallace and Gromit series^[1]. During the beginning of the short, Wallace constructs a Rocket to go to the Moon, under the belief that it’s made of cheese. During this montage sequence, Wallace can be seen hammering in a brief shot lasting up to 2 seconds long. The entire scene can be found on the official Wallace And Gromit YouTube Channel (shown below) and has 1.7 million views as of April 30th, 2015.

The earliest-known instance of the shot appearing on social media was posted by YouTuber mschongkong on August 20th, 2010 under the title: "A Grand Day Out Building A Rocket.mp4", with the hammering sequence found 28 seconds in. The earliest-known remix of the shot on Youtube is called “Wallace hammering!” by Leopoldo3. The video focuses primarily on the hammering shot 7 seconds in, and features rudimentary remixing techniques from that point onward.

On September 16th, 2019, a video titled “Wallace hammering for 1 hour” was posted by user Ardoink (shown left). The video features the now iconic shot of Wallace Hammering for an hour. It is seamlessly looped, while the music track “Constructing the Rocket” (shown right) plays on repeat with accompanying sounds of the striking hammer. The video received over 750K views as of October 20th, 2022. Due to its HD video and sound quality, it is used as a template for future remixes.

Spread

"Wallace Hammering" would gain traction in YouTube relevance after Aug 11, 2022, when user “El Pinoles” posted an hour-long variant to the Wallace And Gromit music track “Building the Rocket” ( shown below) to the site. This particular extension would receive over 17k views and over 300 likes as of October 22nd, 2022.

A spike in remixes and related content would start around September 2nd, 2022. YouTuber Rementin would post “Wallace hammering for 1 hour but its The Caretaker's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World” (shown below, left) to the site, receiving nearly 150k views and over 6k likes as of October 22nd, 2022. On the same day, user Orville Redenpiller posted several sped-up variants of Wallace Hammering, with the most-viewed popular variant being in 4x speed (shown below, right) receiving over 200k views.

Eventually, the spread lead certain YouTubers to make discussion videos about the clip. On September 5th, 2022, sser DKrazy calculated how truly powerful Wallace would theoretically be in the video “Wallace Using 1% of his Power” (shown left). On October 10th, the user "Some Boi Online", discussed the rise in popularity of the source video provided by Ardoink.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References