This guy looks like he won't crack so easily.
When some animals give birth, they do so in the form of laying eggs. However, these eggs start out essentially lifeless. It takes some time before the living being that is inside will come out of them.
In media though, there are characters that are living eggs with a face and possibly legs. These eggs aren't necessarily likely to hatch into anything else, but most of them are still just as fragile as a regular egg, and they know this for a fact. As such, they often take as many precautions to make sure they don't accidentally shatter.
There may or may not be some crossover with Eggshell Clothing, in which the egg itself isn't alive, but the character "wears" it so they look like a walking egg.
The version with limbs may resemble a Cephalothorax.
Subtrope to Anthropomorphic Food. Not to be confused with the main antagonist of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise, Dr. Eggman, the walrus, nor closeted Transgender folk.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Advertising
- Gudetama, a Sanrio mascot, is a depressed, slumping egg yolk surrounded by his broken shell, who's been inexplicably successful as a mascot despite (or because of) the Black Comedy surrounding the character.
- One Kinder Surprise commercial
starred a version of Humpty Dumpty with a human-like face and skin, and speaking in some sort of strange gibberish.
Kinder. Yebol shakey. Me unscrubbly. Chocadoobie! Dumbi chocadoobie, bob swobble. Ho ho ho! Toy!
Asian Animation
- There's a Taiwanese Doraemon knockoff, titled "IQ Egg" (IQ蛋) where Doraemon was changed from a robot cat to a giant, human-sized sentient egg with pockets for retrieving gadgets. No, not making this up. Apparently the magazine's publishers ran into licensing issues for Doraemon, so they created a Captain Ersatz by literally drawing over existing Doraemon artwork.
- Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf:
- Jollie and his brother Darton, both introduced in the first season's Great War in the Bizarre World Story Arc, are anthropomorphic eggs with arms and legs.
- Joys of Seasons features a race of limbless blue egg aliens that visit Earth several times. Differently-colored versions of these aliens appear earlier in the show, in Season 1.
Comic Books
- Invoked with Condorito's friend "Huevo Duro" (lit. "Hard-boiled Egg"), a guy who has a bald egg-shaped head and white skin and he's one of Condorito's best friends along with Don Chuma, Ungenio y Garganta de Lata.
- The Multiversity: Intellectron, one of the Gentry, is a black, one-eyed egg with bat wings.
- The Silver Age Wonder Woman villain Egg-Fu is a Red Chinese giant egg with a prehensile moustache. A revamped version of the character named Chang Tzu later appeared in 52, where he was redesigned to tone down the racist aspects of the character.
- Edgar "Eggsy" Fullerton Young from Harley Quinn is possibly the post-Flashpoint version of Egg-Fu, although the characters have little in common. Eggsy is a benevolent small-time American Mad Scientist who happens, for never-explained reasons, to be a sentient egg in Power Armor, and becomes one of Harley's little gang of weirdos in Coney Island.
Comic Strips
- U.S. Acres as well the animated version in Garfield and Friends has Sheldon, a little chicken who hasn't completely hatched from his egg (but doesn't want to do it), being basically a talking egg with legs and a most extreme case of Eggshell Clothing.
Fairy Tales
- The titular character from the Nursery Rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" is an egg that fell from sitting on a wall and shattered to pieces. All the king's horses and men were unable to put him back together again. (Actually, it's not entirely clear that the poem was originally about an egg, since it never says so explicitly; if it was, it may have originated as a riddle, with the riddle part being lost when the answer became universally known.)
Films — Animation
- Just as the Nursery Rhyme, Humpty Dumpty from Puss in Boots (2011) is a talking egg with clothes who has a life of his own. Different from the story, he's one of Puss's friends before meeting Shrek and he's a Manipulative Bastard who uses Puss for his own ulterior motives. When his shell is broken, it turns out that he's a golden egg laid by the goose from another nursery rhyme; it Makes Just as Much Sense in Context.
- Una película de huevos and its sequels, like Huevocartoon TV feature walking, talking eggs, but feature them in the human world with the Animal Talk trope in play. Also, most unhatched eggs have some attributes which help identify their true animal species. Reptilian eggs, for example, are usually green in coloration, have slit pupils, sharp teeth, and, in Serp's case, fully developed tails signaling the impending emergence of the hatchling inside.
Literature
- The Big Over Easy is about the investigation of the suspicious death of Humpty Dumpty note , who, like in the nursery rhyme, is a large (about 4.5 ft tall), anthropomorphic egg with a love of sitting on walls. The fact that Humpty is an egg factors into his characterization, as he has a crippling fear of mongooses and egg timers, and also into his death, since it's eventually revealed he hatched.
- One of the stories in My Great-Grandfather, the Heroes and I by James Krüss takes place in an entire town of living eggs, where the mayor, a rotten egg called Adolf, spreads hatred of hard-boiled eggs among the townsfolk.
- A literal expy of Humpty Dumpty from the nursery rhyme appears in the Thursday Next book The Well of Lost Plots, as the leader of a union of characters from the oral tradition demanding better treatment and their own home in the Bookverse. Like in the nursery rhyme, he's a large, anthropomorphic egg.
- In Through the Looking Glass, Alice encounters Humpty Dumpty, the nursery rhyme character, a very argumentative fellow. Like in the rhyme, he's a large, anthropomorphic egg who loves sitting on walls. He wears a suit with what is either a cravat or a cummerbund (unclear as he doesn't have a neck).
Live-Action TV
- Both the British and Australian incarnations of the children's program, Play School features the character of Humpty Dumpty imagined as an anthropomorphic egg. Humpty is a plush doll in-show, but the presenters speak for him in skits.
Music
- The video to "Coming Around" by Travis features an egg with arms and legs (but no eyes, ears or mouth... yet people in-universe can apparently hear him talking) who is invited to a concert by a human woman and spends the video trying to get there. Unfortunately he gets attacked by a gang of youths and ends up falling off a wall, Humpty Dumpty-style... and hatches, revealing singer Fran Healy inside.
Toys
- Frug from the Gogo's Crazy Bones series Power is an anthropomorphic egg with arms. According to his official bio, he comes first and last at everything at the same time, a trait that's confusing even to him (this might be a reference to the "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" question). Frug's Wanted variation is decorated like an Easter egg.
- Rotten Egg from The Grossery Gang is an expired egg that was mutated from the gross conditions of the Yucky Mart, bringing him to life. A crack on his shell makes up his mouth, and he has various spots where his yolk is leaking from him as well. His animated counterpart, Egghead, has added limbs as well. A few variants of him in special Easter packages gave him various colors to make him look like a rotten Easter egg instead.
- Tamagotchi: The Gotchi King is a Tamagotchi resembling a giant golden egg with limbs or facial features.
Video Games
- Crash Bandicoot: The villain N. Trance is, in fact, an alien egg with a cybernetic body. However, he is not perfectly attached to it, and he can be removed from the body.
- Dizzy: The titular character is an anthropomorphic egg who is part of a race of egg-like people called the Yolkfolk, who live in a High Fantasy world of dragons, trolls and treetop villages.
- Golden Force has sentient, man-sized eggs as enemies, who comes at you with a Rolling Attack.
- Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass: The Clockwork Eggs that run Ms. Robin's shops that are scattered throughout the world, after she moves to a new location. Although, they just say:
Welcome to Ms. Robin's automated shop.
Would you like to make a purchase?
[... if the shop menu is entered and exited, even if nothing was bought]
Thank you for your patronage. - Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time: Sunnycide is essentially a giant, living, tentacled version of the Yoob eggs it guards, with a large crack across its middle forming its mouth.
- Mega Munchers Deluxe: One of the troggles is an egg with arms and a face named Eggy, who hops around and will squish the Muncher if he catches him.
- Moshi Monsters: The Boiled Boffins are a species of anthropomorphic, nerdy eggs.
- One Night at Flumpty's: The titular Flumpty Bumpty is essentially a Humpty Dumpty expy who tries to murder you and either fry or boil your eyes.
- Pokémon:
- Zigzagged with Exeggcute. It consists of six sentient eggs, of which some have visible cracks. However, certain Pokédex entries specify them more as being seeds, while still referring to them as the egg Pokémon. Other entries call them eggs, leaving it up to ambiguous as to whether or not they actually are eggs.
- Downplayed with Chansey, who is classified as the "Egg Pokémon", being egg-shaped and having one in her pouch. Although besides those indicators, it is unclear whether or not she is supposed to literally be an egg or any other sort of creature.
- Togepi skirts on the edge of this trope— it resembles a walking cracked egg, with its yellow body as the "yolk", but its evolutions make it clear that it's simply a creature that wears Eggshell Clothing.
- Slime Rancher 2: Yolky slimes resemble fried eggs with eyes.
- Transistor: Cluckers are eggs with legs that fire area of effect attacks.
- In An Untitled Story, you are an egg that leaps out from its nest and starts exploring a wide world around it by hopping around, earning new abilities that lets you expand its horizons and eventually hatching into a bird that can explore even more areas that were inaccessible before.
Web Animation
- In Two More Eggs, the "Poach & Scramble" segments involve two eggs with limbs and faces who try to avoid becoming someone's breakfast. The shorts always end with them (or some other anthropomorphic food in their vicinity) getting cooked anyway.
- The Crack: The three main characters, Jason, Dan, and Crisi, are all hopping talking eggs who get involved in crazy adventures such as running from potato cops, pushing zombie eggs off the counter, and roaming the world of Minecraft.
- Sir Pentious's Adorable Evil Minions in Hazbin Hotel consist of anthropomorphic eggs known simply as the Egg Boiz.
- There's always going to be a market for this in the Object Show Community.
- There are two characters named Eggy: one from Battle for Dream Island and the other from Object Land. They're both eggs as you can tell by their name.
- Nice Show For Weenies has a dark, rock-shaped and conventional-looking egg named Eggyiey and Eggcardo respectively.
- The Shimmers from Inanimate Insanity are extraterrestrial light beings that use Eggshell Clothing as their bodies.
- Weebland Bob resemble eggs.
Web Original
- Nightmare Beings
- One dream was about a two-legged egg creature with big black lips and a silly straw extending from its torso that it used to drink its own yolk. It fell and broke open, revealing it was filled with worms all along.
- Another featured a nature documentary about some sort of bird whose eggs walked around on insect-like legs and formed a centipede-like chain.
Web Video
- The Annoying Orange: Much like all other food that appears in the series, eggs are sentient beings that talk with others. One of the more notable ones being Arnold SchwarzenEGGer. Upon interacting with Orange, he ends up hatching into a terminator egg. After getting struck, he hatches again into a terminator chick.
Western Animation
- The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: The Yokians are a race of green blobs with eye-stalks that live in floating robot bodies shaped like eggs. Their biological component acts like yolk in eggs, and have a crack-like mouth in the suit to speak.
- Colin and Felix from The Amazing World of Gumball are among Elmore Junior High's nerdiest characters. They're nothing more than brown chicken eggs with legs, feet, and pants. Quite literally and figuratively "Eggheads".
- Comi Color Cartoons: The short "Humpty Dumpty" is about the nursery rhyme character's son Humpty Dumpty, Jr. attempting to court a woman named Easter Egg and confronting a villain called the Bad Egg, all of them being anthropomorphic eggs.
- Huevocartoon TV: The characters are anthropomorphic eggs living in a civilized and humorous setting comprised of other anthropomorphic eggs.
- There is an obscure cartoon adaptation of Humpty Dumpty where Humpty is the only white egg in a kingdom populated by humans and other egg people. An evil snake (who is probably Satan) tricks Humpty into thinking that being the only white egg makes him better than everyone else in order to lure him into climbing the wall so he could eat him. Getting cracked from falling off the wall leaves him unable to walk until he is healed by The King.
- The Tales from the Goose Lady short "The Egg Who Would Be King" consists of a bizarre twist on Humpty Dumpty where the egg-man was laid by a chicken who was jealous of the goose that laid golden eggs. After his mother boots him out due to branding him another failure in laying valuable eggs, Humpty then decides to become King of Fairy Tale Land, only for his subjects to knock him off his wall via Produce Pelting after they get sick of their king being too lazy to do anything about their problems.
