Studio: Ub Iwerks Studio (ComiColor Cartoons)
Distributor: Celebrity Productions
Produced by: Ub Iwerks
Short Synopsis
The Iwerks Humpty Dumpty is not the egg of the rhyme but his son, Humpty Dumpty Junior, a young egg in love with a pretty girl egg who lives on the other side of the wall. His rival is a bad egg, a rotten, green-tinged egg with a villain's moustache who wants the girl for himself. The young hero courts her from the top of the wall; the villain schemes; and when the bad egg carries the girl off, Humpty Junior gives chase along the wall and the rooftops, with the villain's rottenness as his weakness. The great fall is the villain's: the bad egg goes off the wall and smashes, and all the king's horses and men are not needed, since nobody wants to put a bad egg together again. Humpty Junior gets the girl. The Wikipedia entry is a stub, and the account above is drawn from the film itself.
Why It Matters
- Turning the rhyme into a romance with the fall transferred to a villain is a neat solution to a nursery rhyme with no story, and the bad egg, with his green cast and oily manner, is a good Iwerks villain; Al Eugster, who shares the animation credit, was one of the studio's best hands and later worked at Fleischer and Disney.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright never renewed, and it circulates widely; the Fleischers' Greedy Humpty Dumpty of the following year took the opposite approach, making Humpty a tyrant, and the two films together show how freely the studios treated the rhyme.
Notes and Trivia
- Eugster had animated with Iwerks at Disney in the 1920s and followed him to the new studio.
- The ComiColors were by now distributed by Celebrity Productions, Pat Powers's company.
- See also: Greedy Humpty Dumpty (1936), Simple Simon (1935), Ali Baba (1936).
