Harvey NicholsCalll it Wallace & Gromit and the Case of the Stolen Video.
Aardman Animations, the British company behind everyone's favorite plasticine heroes, confirmed it has a new mystery on their hands after a pirated copy of the upcoming Wallace & Gromit Christmas special, A Matter of Loaf and Death, somehow found its way onto YouTube.
Three unauthorized clips from the BBC TV program—the first Wallace & Gromit short since 1995's A Close Shave and first entry of any kind in the beloved franchise since 2005's feature-length Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit—were uploaded to the video-sharing site on Sunday by a user identified only as Joshua of Waterloo, Canada.
The decidedly lo-fi footage appears to have been captured using a video camera or cell phone, but was enough to make Aardman to spring into action, joining forces with YouTube to take down the clips before they proliferated.
"Very occasionally files slip through, but YouTube can react very quickly and in this case removed the video within a few minutes," Aardman's digital content manager, Robin Gladmam, says in a statement.
The 30-minute A Matter of Loaf and Death, shot in stop-motion by Oscar-winning director Nick Park, is a Hitchcockian whodunit about a deadly "Cereal" killer offing the local bakers. It is scheduled to premiere on Christmas Day on BBC One.