Shaun the Sheep is a spin-off of the Wallace & Gromit franchise, with the character first appearing in the Academy Award-winning short A Close Shave (1995).

Shaun got his name as a pun on the word 'shorn' after being accidentally subjected to Wallace's automated sheep shearing machine in A Close Shave.

No official explanation has ever been given in the show for how the flock transferred from living with Wallace and Gromit to Mossy Bottom Farm.

Each seven-minute episode is shot using Aardman's traditional stop-motion animation technique.

The series deliberately avoids any spoken dialogue or readable text on screen; all signage, like on pizza boxes or bus stops, is replaced by illegible scrawls and pictures, with the rare exception of the word 'Bitzer' on a dog bowl and 'Mossy Bottom Farm' on a gate in the Series 4 title sequence.

Although the original series is silent aside from sound effects, a Hindi-dubbed version broadcast on Nickelodeon India was reworked with actual scripted dialogue.

An anime adaptation of Shaun the Sheep was planned in 2008 but was ultimately scrapped, though artist Larry Bundy Jr. produced character designs for the project.

In August 2022, the European Space Agency sent a Shaun the Sheep figure aboard the Artemis 1 mission, which launched on 16 November 2022 and returned to Earth on 11 December when the Orion capsule splashed down.