Feathers McGraw

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Feathers McGraw hijacks the techno-trousers
Feathers McGraw hijacks the techno-trousers

Feathers McGraw is a fictional character who appears in the animated Wallace & Gromit film The Wrong Trousers.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

A mute yet sinister penguin, Feathers appears after Wallace advertises for a lodger. As the story progresses, Feathers ingratiates himself with Wallace, gradually pushing Gromit out of the picture and causing him to run away.

Feathers takes an interest in the techno-trousers that Wallace has bought for Gromit's birthday. He reconfigures the control panel, putting the controls into a remote, and controlling the trousers. Spied on by Gromit, Feathers is revealed as a criminal mastermind who plans on using the trousers in his latest heist.

He disguises himself as a chicken by wearing a red rubber glove on his head. This is apparently enough to fool Wallace, Gromit, and local law enforcement (at one point in the movie, Gromit spots a wanted poster of Feathers McGraw entitled, "Have You Seen This Chicken?").

When Gromit is wrongfully imprisoned in A Close Shave, a graffito on the cell wall reads "Feathers woz ere". According to the book 'The World of Wallace and Gromit', in A Close Shave, Feathers himself is in one shot. He can be seen when Gromit is falling down the cliff; his face is embedded in the cliff face.

He also makes a cameo appearance in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit: when Victor fires the gun containing the Golden Carrot, he snarls: "Eat karat, bunny boy". This is followed by the were-rabbit looking worried. Gromit then comes flying over the wall. On the right-hand side of Gromit's scene is a rooftop, and in front of this is an urn. Feathers McGraw is shown standing in this urn.

Feathers had brief cameo appearances in many episodes of the computer-animated cartoon show ReBoot.

Feathers also appears in the video game Wallace and Gromit in Project Zoo where he takes over the zoo to create a diamond mine (maintaining his obsession with diamonds). Feathers captures baby animals in order to force their parents to do his bidding. He uses a remote control to take control of his inventions. His inventions includes his boiler, his helicopter, toy penguins, and his mining machine. In the final level, Feathers uses an invention called the exoskeleton, and it can fire missiles and buzzsaws. In the ending movie, Feathers' machine was defeated, but Feathers makes an escape. When he exits from his hideout to leave the zoo, the animals catch him, and take him back to his cell.

Feathers McGraw may also be among the penguins glimpsed on the television program, "When Penguins Turn", in the Cracking Contraptions short, The Tellyscope.

[edit] Feathers McGraw in popular media

The popular German computer magazine C't frequently uses a penguin with a strong resemblance to Feathers in most of their articles about Linux. The pointy beak and the long head bear a much closer resemblance to Feathers than to the penguin Tux, who is the official Linux mascot. The images are designed especially for C't by the media company Tsamedien, so any possible 'secret' Wallace & Gromit-Fans are more likely to be found there. Almost all of these images can be downloaded as desktop backgrounds at resolutions up to 1600x1200 for private use from the C't-Homepage.

His bounty before his capture was £1000.

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