Greedy Humpty Dumpty
About Greedy Humpty Dumpty
King Humpty Dumpty sits on a turret of gold bricks, counts coins, and gnaws a turkey leg while his nursery-rhyme subjects sing "Look Out, Look Out." A sunbeam convinces him the sun is a gold crown, and he whips the kingdom into building the wall up to it. Three men in a tub mix mortar, Mother Goose's goose trowels with its beak, and witches haul bricks on broomsticks. At the top he chops into the sun with an axe. Flame, a lightning spanking, and a jackhammer bolt bring the tower down, and Humpty shatters. The town fits him back together until someone sets the crown on his head and the weight breaks him again.
Cast & crew
More about Greedy Humpty Dumpty
A Color Classics short produced by Max Fleischer and directed by Dave Fleischer. David Tendlar and William Sturm animated it. Paramount released it on July 10, 1936.
Themes
Making
Tendlar and Sturm animated Humpty's staircase dance up the rising bricks and the sun's lightning, which takes a human shape and spanks him.
Technique
Cels were photographed against miniature sets with Fleischer's Stereoptical process, in Technicolor.
Music
Sammy Timberg wrote the music with Bob Rothberg. The subjects' complaint is the song "Look Out, Look Out," and the short ends on the nursery rhyme.
Preservation
The UCLA Film & Television Archive lent the print used for Back From the Ink, a restoration project of Seth MacFarlane and Martin Scorsese. That print premiered at the TCM Classic Film Festival on April 20, 2024, and Turner Classic Movies broadcast it on September 25, 2025.
Notes
- Gus Wickie, Fleischer's Bluto, voices Humpty. Mae Questel voices Little Bo Peep and the children.
- Mother Goose's warning is sung: "Don't try too high to build your wall, 'cause the higher you go, the harder you'll fall.
- A construction motif from the tower sequence turns up again in The Tears of an Onion (1938), which Tendlar also directed.
- Little Bo Peep, Little Boy Blue, Mother Goose, and the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe are among the subjects he puts to work.
Scenes
- Humpty smells gold in a sunbeam and pictures the sun as a faceted crown.
- Witches, storks, and Mother Goose's goose run an assembly line of bricks.
- The crown goes back on the reassembled egg and its weight cracks him apart.
Influenced by
- Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme
Also available
- VHS: The Fabulous Fleischer Folio, Volume Two (1985, Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment)
- DVD: Max Fleischer's Color Classics: Somewhere in Dreamland (2002, VCI Entertainment)
Quotes
Why didn't I know there was gold in the sun? I'll get that too, before I'm done.
Don't try too high to build your wall, 'cause the higher you go, the harder you'll fall.
All mine!
Phooey!
