Humpty Dumpty

Plot synopsis:
The opening titles introduce the characters: Humpty Dumpty Jr., the hero; Easter Egg, the heroine; and the Bad Egg, the mustache-twirling villain. We meet Humpty sitting precariously on a pitcher. Next to the vase is a storybook, with his old man pictured on the front.Chorus: [singing] Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. / Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. / All the king's horses and all the king's men / Couldn't put Humpty together again.Humpty Jr. [singing] My old man may have sat on a wall. / He slipped and had a very great fall. / But I'm Humpty Jr. / I'm just like my pop. / I climb where I please / And they can't make me stop.Humpty's mother is sweeping up the kitchen counter when she peers through her glasses and sees her boy.Mother: Junior! Come down from there!Humpty loses his balance and falls. Mother rushes up to him and catches him with her apron just in time. Mother is relieved and then angry.Mother: You be careful! That's how you're father got cracked.Humpty walks off sulking. We dissolve to Easter Egg, gaily skipping along the counter, hitting cups and things with a stick. Humpty hides behind a small pitcher and then appears in front of her just before she passes. He presents her with a bouquet of parsley and then blushes.The two of them walk arm in arm.Humpty Jr.: [singing] The moment you arrived I had a feeling / I'd never be contented till we met. / There never was an egg quite so appealing. / Oh, won't you join me in an omelet?Humpty Jr. and Easter Egg: [singing] Spooning in a spoon, / We don't need a moon, / Poached or fried or on the side, / Morning, night or noon. / Scrambled in a tune, / Deviled with a croon, / In a cup or sunny side up, / Spooning in a spoon.The two sweethearts rock back and forth in an spoon, as dancing eggs, looking like the albumen version of the Ziegfeld Follies, appear from nowhere and perform their high-kicking steps behind them.The Bad Egg, wearing top and tails and trailed by his own visible stink, appears from behind a bowl. He jumps on the spoon's handle, throwing the two lovers out of the bowl of the spoon. "Scram!" the Bad Egg demands of Humpty. He grabs the girl and kisses her up her arm as she cries for help.The Bad Egg drags her away, past a pot of boiling water and another pot of spaghetti. Soon the Bad Egg has her on higher ground: the kitchen cabinets. She bites his hand and runs away, knocking off a box of matches and upsetting a can of tomatoes. The Bad Egg trips over the can, but catches up with Easter and corners her. She knocks over a pepper shaker, pours out some pepper and throws it in the Bad Egg's face. He sneezes and rubs his eyes, but then continues to force himself on her.Humpty finally catches up to the Bad Egg and is ready to fight. The Bad Egg throws Easter into the pot of boiling water. Humpty is forced to leave the Bad Egg and go save his girl.He makes a lasso of a spaghetti strand, throws it over Easter and pulls her out of the water. Unfortunately, Easter is now hard-boiled. "Scram!" she tells her one-time boyfriend.The Bad Egg laughs maliciously at this turn of events. Humpty is now prepared for his fight. But Easter shoves Humpty out of the way and takes care of the business herself. She punches the Bad Egg over and over, and he is incapable of defending himself. Humpty keeps his distance and cheers his girl on, punching the air as if participating in the fight himself. He gets overexcited, though, and falls into the boiling water himself.Meanwhile, the effect of the hot water has worn off the girl. The Bad Egg grabs her again; and again she cries for help. Humpty pulls himself out of the boiling water, now a tough egg himself.He returns to the Bad Egg and punches him off the pantry. The dazed Bad Egg now stumbles along the kitchen counter. Humpty strikes matches and throws them in the direction of the Bad Egg. The cad is surrounded by burning matches and keeps running into them, burning himself. Humpty throws the entire box of matches on the Bad Egg, blackening him. Defeated, the Bad Egg falls down in the bowl of the spoon. Humpty jumps on the handle, throwing the Bad Egg out. The villain falls on the kitchen floor and breaks open. Skunks run out of the broken shell.The tough egg now meets the hard-boiled dame and kisses her hard on the lips. We dissolve to the pair back in their spoon. Luckily, both have returned to their former state, as an innocent boy and girl. They sing a refrain of their song.Humpty Jr. and Easter Egg: [singing] Spooning in a spoon, / We don't need a moon, / Poached or fried or on the side, / Morning, night or noon. / Scrambled in a tune, / Deviled with a croon.Chorus: In a cup or sunny-side up. / Spooning in a spoon!

Tags: good versus evil, psychedelic

Review:
Faded beauty from another age..
Superb cartoon from early animation pioneer, and 'the man who brought life to Mickey Mouse', Ub Iwerks, that makes up in invention, wit and draughtsmanship what it lacks in 'modern' fluency (although it has a wonderful, faded pace of its own).
Unlike later Disney features, which quickly standardised plot and character, Iwerks' films are characterised by play, irony, metamorphosis and self-reflexivity.
They are also, contrary to THE SIMPSONS' back-handed homages, still very funny.HUMPTY DUMPTY is a hugely enjoyable case in point.
It starts with Iwerks' trademark credits on a book cover which opens onto a prosceniumed parade of the cast, headed, of course, by the titular hero, and also the gnashing aristocrat, Bad Egg.
The film than daringly splits this first frame to impose another, featuring a picture with 'Humpty Dumpty' written on.
We discover that our hero is already dead, before the narrative has even started, a brilliant coup.
His widow and son live on the kitchen counter, and this and its implements are so marvellously and accurately rendered that they provide a realistic background against which the nonsense (it is a film about talking eggs remember) takes place, offering an astonishing surrealist spectacle.The main action concerns Humpty's son, and his love for a young egg threatened by the rapacious villainy of Bad Egg.
Their love song contrives to be both hilariously ludicrous (they croon in a spoon; behind them a sextet of dancing eggs join them) and strangely moving.
Bad Egg intrudes and a sublime series of melodramatic/slapstick antics proceed, influenced by silent comedy, but with an inventive violence of its own.Bad Egg grabs young Dumpty's lady, and she tries to escape, utilising kitchen elements that come to hand, making strange what we take for granted.
Her lover is next to useless, and when she falls into boiling water she emerges a tarty hussy who manages to defeat Bad Egg with commendable frankness.
Bad Egg's demise is beautifully gruesome.
Happily, Dumpty's lover doesn't revert to her old timid self, and he seems very pleased with his new, fearsome missus, but then he needed his aged mother to rescue him earlier from precipatory death with her aprons.
The mid-30s faded colours are exquisitely, yearningly beautiful..
Great visuals, charming (if dated) sight gags and jokes..
This is a very cute cartoon that allows Iwerks to make full use of his color system.
Charming, if by now overly familiar, sight gags and beautiful detail work make this an entertaining effort from the studio.
The colors hold up very well almost 70 years later and match up with Disney for the most part rather favorably.
Good to have in print and available.
Well worth watching.
Recommended..
Humpty Dumpty and the bad egg.
While not one of my favourites, Ub Iwerks was responsible for a lot of interesting work.
Especially when working with Walt Disney, his oldest friend and one of his best, and co-creating one of animation's most famous characters in Mickey Mouse.
His career since opening his own studio had interest value but the quality was variable, often being successful in the animation and music but wanting in the story and variable in gags, lead characters and tone.1933 to 1936 saw twenty five cartoons, mostly based on famous fairytales and familiar stories, as part of Iwerks's "ComiColor" series.
The "ComiColor" series is very much worth watching and interesting, as is the case with many series some cartoons are better than others but there are no real animation nadirs.
1935's 'Humpty Dumpty' is a pretty good pleasant watch, with a few issues but a lot of big strengths.Admittedly, 'Humpty Dumpty' is slight and is at times a little too cutesy and the ending can be smelt from miles away in a fairly standard good versus evil tale.However, 'Humpty Dumpty' has enough freshness to stop it from being stale.
It avoids the over sentimental factor generally and is never dull.There are amusing gags, that aren't too corny and never repetitive, it's very charming, endearingly wild at times and there is a genuine likeability.
charm and cuteness.
The characters drive 'Humpty Dumpty' well (apart from the fairly bland love interest), with a very likeable titular character whose antics can be surprisingly inventive and a fun villain.Furthermore, the animation is great.
Meticulously detailed, fluid in drawing, vibrant in colour and often rich in imagination and visual wit.
The music is cleverly and lushly orchestrated, is infectiously catchy and adds a lot to the cartoon.In conclusion, pretty good.
7/10 Bethany Cox. Pretty awful.....
This cartoon consists of a Snidely Whiplash/Simon Legree type of evil egg (called 'The Bad Egg') stealing the nice lady Easter Egg. So Humpty Dumpty Jr. comes to her rescue.While the animation quality of Ub Iwerks color films of the mid- 1930s is very nice, I am definitely NOT a fan.
Instead of humor his cartoons consistently went for overly cute...with lots of singing and they were about as edgy as bowling balls.
"Humpty Dumpty" is clearly an example of this sort of cartoon--with lovely animation but also a story and singing that make it second-rate.
Now I cannot just attack Iwerks...many 1930s cartoons were sappy like this and the wonderful cartoons from MGM (Iwerks' parent company) and Warner Brothers weren't to come until the 1940s.
This is why when they show old cartoons on TV today, they almost never show shorts from the 1930s.
With the exception of Disney and the Fleischer Brothers, the rest were a sorry lot by later standards..
Fun Short.
Humpty Dumpty (1935) ** 1/2 (out of 4)Decent short from Ub Iwerks has Humpty Dumpty, Jr. talking about his father and soon afterwards falling in love with a female egg.
Before long a bad egg shows up and the three do a battle.
HUMPTY DUMPTY probably should have been named something else since I'm sure people are going to turn it on and expect the classic tale and not something with his son.
With that said, for the most part this is a fun short that gives us plenty of action and I must admit that it was somewhat charming seeing the three eggs battling one another.
There's no doubt that the film would have benefited from more laughs but this was still an entertaining short..
Not What It's 'Cracked' Up To Be. This was a weak effort, to be honest.
It started out promising, with Humpty Dumpty Jr., yes, the famous egg's kid.Dumpty falls from the ledge, gets caught by mother and gets a lecture on not being dumb like his father who wound up falling "and getting cracked." What we wind up with in this story is "Junior" falling for a female egg and having to fight off "the bad egg" to get her.
It drags on a bit too much with a predictable ending.
In the middle and at the end we get a song about "spooning." Overall, this wasn't one of the better efforts in the collection of a DVD called "Cartoons That Time Forget: The UB Iwerks Collection Vol. 1.".
Director: UB IWERKS.
Music: Carl W.
Stalling.
Color by Cinecolor.
Producers: Ub Iwerks, Pat Powers.
A P.A. Powers' ComiColor Cartoon.
Not copyrighted by Celebrity Productions, Inc. U.S. release: 1935.
COMMENT: It's not the real Humpty Dumpty, but Humpty Dumpty junior, who graces this witty little romance in which Junior falls in love with an Easter Egg, who is then carried off by a really villainous Bad Egg. Fortunately, Easter Egg falls into a pan of boiling water which causes him to emerge as a hard-boiled egg.
I love the production number, "Spooning in a Spoon", which happily is reprized at the finale.
Despite this cartoon's rather slow start, this is an entry you can put on your premium "Must See and Highly Recommended" list.