Cynthia Ward · From fps #5 · November 11, 2005 | You can watch any number of movies and read any number of novels and tour guides, but you never truly know what a foreign country is like until you visit. I knew the British had a fondness for cheese, but I didn't grasp the depth of their commitment until I went to London in 2002. Venturing into an unremarkable corner supermarket to seek the absinthe and Cuban rum forbidden in the USA, I found instead a sizeable cheese section, hardly confined to Stilton and fruited cheddars. Impressed, I loaded my basket. Then I turned around and found the cheese deli, stuffed with triple-cremes and other specialty cheeses that I had to venture to Seattle to buy, at outrageous prices, in the Pike Place Market's European specialty grocery. But the breadth of English supermarket cheese selections was clearly nothing special to the natives choosing Camemberts and Edams on either side of me.

Wallace & Gromit in Three Amazing Adventures Directed by Nick Park Aardman Animation/DreamWorks Home Entertainment, 2005 90 minutes Shop for Wallace & Gromit DVDs and more: Amazon.ca Amazon.com AllPosters.com

Fall 2005 has brought imported cheeses to my rural Washington Safeway, the first Wallace and Gromit full-length feature movie to the American cineplex, and a new Wallace and Gromit DVD to my home. Titled Wallace & Gromit in Three Amazing Adventures, this DVD collects the three original, classic Wallace and Gromit short films, along with ten "never-before-seen mini-shorts" from 2002 called Cracking Contraptions (which have been seen before, just not on DVD in North America.)

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You'll find it and many other articles in the November 2005 issue of fps, available for only 99 cents US.