09-05-2025
Hilarious recreation of Wallace and Gromit morning routine goes viral... but it took a whole year of planning
An inventor has recreated the iconic Wallace and Gromit morning routine complete with self-making toast and jam in a project that has been in the works for the past year.
Joseph Herscher, 40, recreated the classic scene from Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers, in which Wallace builds an elaborate machine to simplify his morning routine.
In total, it took him two months to complete the project and two full days of filming to create the now 29-second scene.
After spotting his viral inventions online a year ago, the creators of the Wallace and Gromit Aardman Animations reached out to Joseph and offered him a tour, which sparked his decision to go ahead with this project.
Having been a fan of the British series since his younger years, Joseph, who has been a full-time inventor and YouTuber for over 12 years, said 'it felt like a childhood dream come to life.'
'I have wondered about how this invention could be made since I first saw the film in 1993,' he said.
'It took about two months on and off to get it to a point where we could go ahead and film it.'
He added: 'This project really meant a lot more to me than some of my other ones.
'Having been an Aardman fan since I was a kid, this really felt like I was fulfilling every little inventor's dream.'
To play Gromit, Joseph, who is based in London, hired a dog named Archie who underwent a few training sessions to learn his role.
This involved pushing a button to catapult the jam onto a piece of toast as it pops out of a toaster.
As the project got underway, it became clear that two key elements were going to be hardest to perfect: sliding down into the trousers and catapulting jam across a table to land on a slice of toast.
With the trousers, Joseph quickly realised the drop was much higher than expected.
Joseph said: 'I realised I wouldn't feel good or safe dropping straight down from that height so we hung a bar that was connected to pullies on a counterweight.
'This meant it could lower me in a more controlled and gradual way before dropping me in the trousers.'
The inventor ended up doing 65 takes to perfect the toast and jam stunt.
In the original cartoon, Wallace has a contraption that times the toast popping up with jam flying across the table to land on it precisely.
It took Joseph a lot of trial and error - and a bit of chemistry - to prevent the jam from splattering everywhere.
Joseph said: 'The jam really did feel like the hardest part of the whole project.
'I realised early on that if I catapulted it as it is, it would just fly everywhere instead of aiming directly for the toast.
'So, I mixed sodium alginate in with the jam before placing it into a bowl of water that has calcium lactate in it.
'Because these two chemicals don't get along, the jam forms a sort of hard skin around it which keeps it in a spherical shape.'
Wallace and Gromit fans couldn't hide their excitement in the comments section of the viral TikTok video, which has more than 190million views.
One person asked: 'How many hours of jam-based bloopers did this have?'
'No one will ever understand how much I wanted one of these when I was little,' a second person said.
A third person wrote : 'I've worked on the film and IMMEDIATELY shared it with the rest of the animators. This is incredible!'
