These six episodes touch on inventions involving and inspired by nature, those dealing with air and space flight, home conveniences, improving senses, safety, and travel in general. Each episode is broken into several segments. These include Wallace's Inventor of the Week, Curiosity Corner, Contraption Countdown and It Never Got Off the Drawing Board. The first segment highlights a particular inventor and the interesting contributions he or she is making in their field.
In the Contraption Countdown segments, Wallace asks the show's historical archivist, Goronwy, to go through several inventions that have been made dealing with the episode's topic. Meanwhile, It Never Got Off the Drawing Board has Science Correspondent Jem Stansfield looking back at inventions that never really made it. Sometimes, like with Einstien's Fridge, the idea simply didn't get very far, while others, like Actress Hedy Lamarr's and Composer George Antheil's frequency-hopping radio transmission system, were just ahead of their time. This particular invention was created by the pair during WWII, but wasn't really used until their patents were rediscovered several years later and used in torpedo guidance.
While Wallace and Gromit introduce each segment of the show, the narrator for the video segments themselves is Ashley Jensen and she does a pretty competent job of making the claymation characters' segues into the video feel fairly seamless.
Some of the show's more interesting highlighted inventions, at least for this writer, include a new type of space suit that, instead of acting like a giant bag that holds in a bit of atmosphere in order to maintain pressure, uses a lot of wires that apply the same amount of pressure to the skin. These wires are shaped and flayed out on the skin to mimic the muscle patterns so that it not only provides the right pressure where it is needed, but it is also form fitting and highly flexible. As a result, the astronauts who use it will have a much wider range of movement.
Another interesting invention was a pair of glasses with a camera on them. These glasses also have a small, popsicle-shaped pad that the user puts in their mouth. This device is used to help the blind know what they are facing by sending specific signals to the tongue. In the video, the glasses' user was brought to a museum that he had never been to before and did a pretty good job telling the viewers what the shape and size of the various exhibits were.
Wallace & Gromit's World of Invention covers a lot of ground in its six short episodes. The Blu-ray version of the show means that the two title characters come through brilliantly and the show comes with a series of how-to videos that show the viewers instructions on making some of the inventions seen in the series. While the show is geared towards a younger audience, parents might want to be warned that some of the work needed in these how-to videos will probably require your help.
Either way, Wallace & Gromit's World of Invention is a fun show for kids who are into science and existing fans of Wallace & Gromit. It's definitely worth checking out.
