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Rex the Runt

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The main characters. From left to right: Vince, Wendy, Bad Bob and Rex

Rex the Runt is an animated (claymation) television show produced by Aardman Animations. Its main characters are four Plasticine dogs: Rex, Wendy, Bob and Vince.

The series began with a short, Ident, in 1989 directed by Richard Goleszowski. After a long gestation period this developed into two unaired shorts and then thirteen ten-minute episodes that first aired over two weeks on BBC2 from December 1998. A second thirteen episode series aired from September 2001 on the same channel. As well as the core cast guest voices included Morwenna Banks, Judith Chalmers, Antoine De Caunes, Bob Holness, Bob Monkhouse, Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton, Arthur Smith, June Whitfield and Eddie Izzard.

The animation is unusual in that the models are almost two-dimensional and are animated to exaggerate this - they are flattened in appearance and animated on a sheet of glass with the backgrounds behind the sheet.

The stories are quite surreal with plots including:

  • Shrinking a submarine to enter Vince's brain in order to cure his random Pavarotti disease
  • Destroying the world by drilling in the north pole
  • Going back in time to prevent their house being stolen
  • Falling down through the bottom of the bed where they soon find a sex clinic
  • Using Bob's shrinking ray to reduce the city of Birmingham to a domestic ornament (with a waste disposal problem)
  • Rex being turned into spaghetti

Plots also regularly make reference to the fact that characters are made of Plasticine, such as one episode where Wendy goes to a hair salon and starts melting when under the hairdryer.

Series One has been released on VHS in the United Kingdom and on DVD in South Korea. A DVD of all 26 episodes has been released in the United States.

References to other Aardman productions

Several episodes of Rex the Runt contain inside references to other television programmes created by Aardman Animations:

  • In the episode "Adventures on Telly Part I", Wallace (from the Wallace and Gromit series) is washing the windows on Rex's house, until Bad Bob pushes his ladder over (in the film A Close Shave, Wallace operates a window washing business).
  • Pib and Pog, two of Aardman's lesser known creations, are present in the spectator gallery during the courtroom scene from "The Trials of Wendy".
  • The exorcist called upon in "Patio" is actually Morph, a character from an Aardman children's show, wearing a trench coat, hat, and large mustache.
  • There are two references in the episode "Wayne the Zebra": A Chicken Run-style chicken is rejected during the auditions (with Bad Bob making a comment regarding the recent popularity of chickens, referring to the film's success), and Bad Bob consults a book entitled Cracking Animation (which lists zebras as one of the top five hardest things to animate, due to their stripes), which has the same distinctive yellow cover as Aardman's how-to book, Creating 3-D Animation.

Trivia

  • Bad Bob's eye-patch switches from eye to eye occasionally. Sometimes it switches many times in one episode.

Random Pavarotti Disease

Random Pavarotti Disease is a psychological disease that mainly affects plastacine dogs. The condition causes the random blurting out of opera-like singing. The only known cure is to go into either the victim's brain or bum, using a shrunken submarine. It rarely works, and, on the rare occasion it does work, causes the random blurting out of programmes from BBC Radio 4 instead (the Shipping Forecast and Gardeners' Question Time were used to demonstrate this).

Episode list

Season 1

  1. "Holiday in Vince"
  2. "Adventures on Telly Part I"
  3. "Adventures on Telly Part II"
  4. "Adventures on Telly Part III"
  5. "Bob's International Hiccup Centre"
  6. "Easter Island"
  7. "Too Many Dogs"
  8. "The Trials of Wendy"
  9. "Stinky's Search for a Star"
  10. "Under the Duvet"
  11. "Johnny Saveloy's Undoing"
  12. "The City Shrinker"
  13. "Carbonara"

Season 2

  1. "Mouse in Me Kitchen"
  2. "Wendy's Hot Date"
  3. "Patio"
  4. "Crap Day Out"
  5. "Slim Bob"
  6. "Private Wendy"
  7. "Rocket Raymond"
  8. "Plasticene Gene"
  9. "Wendy's New Hairdo"
  10. "Wayne the Zebra"
  11. "Art of Cooking"
  12. "Bob Joins a Gang"
  13. "Hole in the Garden"

Rex The Runt merchandise

  • Rex The Runt: The Complete First Season (VHS) B00005NB24
  • Rex The Runt: The Complete Collection (DVD) (US only) (B000068QOF)
  • Rex The Runt: Rainy Day Companion (Book written by Andrew Franks and Kevin Wrench, a.k.a the voices of Rex and Bad Bob) ISBN 0340748621
  • Aardman's Darkside (a compilation DVD featuring episodes of Rex The Runt, to be released on October 18th 2006) (DVD) B000FS9SDM
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