Eggs are part of Easter because of their symbolic representation of life and birth. Why does a giant bunny hide them for children to find? Who the hell knows? Yet every year we participate in this fever dream that even a mountain of cocaine couldn’t reproduce.
This beloved protein source is also a big part of movies, TV shows, social media and even video games — and you probably never even noticed them. So for the purpose of this piece and the Easter season, we’re including only eggs that remained whole on screen and were not thrown in pans and cooked scrambled or over easy. Whole eggs only.
[embedded content] The eggs in Alien
The Alien movies may have taken a wide turn downward since Alien 3, but the first one, released in 1979, is still terrifying, and the eggs that the crew of the Nostromo discover kick off this fright fest. The eggs or “ovomorphs” provide the first really big scare of the whole movie as Kane, played by the great John Hurt, discovers a whole nest of the things and one hatches right in his face. That’s when we’re introduced to the facehugger, the zygote of the Xenomorphy that attaches to a person’s face and hatches its eggs in a human’s stomach so they can burst out of their torso like a meaty jack-in-the-box. [embedded content] The egg ship on Mork & Mindy
Robin Williams’ breakthrough TV role as an alien sent to Earth in a giant egg to study its inhabitants was a spinoff of Happy Days. The son of show creator Garry Marshall fell in love with Star Wars and pitched an idea to his old man about introducing an alien character to land in Richie Cunningham’s backyard. Williams played the bizarre alien in Happy Days’ fifth season and got his own series the following year. Eggs seem be the basis for Mork’s species because they reappear in different forms as spaceships, energy transferers and birthing vessels for Mork’s son Mearth, played by Jonathan Winters, whose species grow Benjamin Button-style.
[embedded content] The acceptance eggs in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
The first Harry Potter movie may feel like it came out a generation ago thanks to its author’s hard right turn toward TERFdom, but an egg is what kicks off Harry’s adventures in the books. Acceptance letters to Hogwarts are delivered in regular looking eggs as Harry’s abusive Aunt Petunia discovers one morning while making breakfast. It’s something she hoped would never happen since she lost her sister, Harry’s mum, to the evil Voldemort. This scene didn’t make it into the theatrical release, but for Potter purists, the eggs are the McGuffin that helps Harry on his way to becoming a wizard.
[embedded content] Yoshi eggs in the Super Mario games
The world first met Mario and Luigi’s dinosaur companion Yoshi in the “Yoshi Island 2” level in Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo. Yoshi pops out of a green and white egg from a question block. The Brooklyn plumbers can ride Yoshi like a horse and punch him in the back of the head (no, seriously) to make Yoshi stick out his tongue and eat enemies. Yoshi can hold turtle shells and, depending on their color, spit them out to knock down other enemies or emit waves of fireballs. This is a game for kids, right? [embedded content] The 50 hard boiled eggs in Cool Hand Luke
Paul Newman’s Luke has a reckless streak in him that puts him behind bars and constantly irritates his jailers. He’s also got a charm and a wit that can win him friends and get him in a whole heap of even more trouble. Is he crazy, untamable or just bored from the tedium of incarceration? Either way, it’s one of his best films, and perhaps the most famous scene takes place halfway through when he challenges himself to eat 50 hard-boiled eggs in an hour without getting sick. [embedded content] Sheldon from U.S. Acres
The best adaptation of Jim Davis’ comic strip aired on Saturday mornings in the ’90s with Garfield and Friends. The show featured original stories about the newspaper’s most famous fat cat along with shorts set on an idyllic farm called U.S. Acres featuring a cast of talking barnyard animals. Sheldon is a chick who still hasn’t hatched from his egg except for his two legs that stick out of the bottom. He’s pretty much always seen with his hatched brother Booker, and just to sell the joke even further, his voice has a muffled quality. [embedded content] Fabergé eggs
Perhaps the most famous, non-edible variety of eggs came from St. Petersburg, Russia, in the mid-1880s. The Fabergé eggs were made for the Russian imperial family known as the Romanovs. The company’s founder, Peter Carl Fabergé, made 50 of his jewel-encrusted eggs after a royal commission from Emperor Alexander III as an Easter present for his wife. The last 40 were commissioned by Nicholas II for his mother and wife. Each one has a unique style such as a Renaissance-style egg, a Coronation egg with a small golden stagecoach and a simple looking Hen egg that houses a small gold yolk and a tiny chased gold hen. They’ve toured art galleries all over the world and are currently on display at the Fabergé Museum in Russia.
[embedded content] The eggs on Dana’s counter in Ghostbusters
The paranormal activity in the apartment of Dana Barrett, played by Sigourney Weaver, that prompts her to become the Ghostbusters’ first paying customer, starts in the kitchen. It turns out that the building she lives in was once a holy altar to a Sumerian sect that worshipped a shapeshifting god known as Gozer, according to Tobin’s Spirit Guide. The evil presence begins to make itself known in the form of poltergeists, starting with the eggs Dana leaves on her counter. The contents of the egg begin to jump out of their shells and fry right on the countertop next to an ominous bag of Stay-Puft Marshmallows. Does she really eat all that junk food? [embedded content] The reproducing eggs in Airplane!
It’s still amazing to see how much great comedy the Zucker brothers and Jim Abrahams could cram into a single movie in their famous sendup of airplane disaster flicks. As the passengers on the plane start to become violently ill due to tainted fish, one of them starts coughing up eggs while Dr. Rumack, played by the brilliant Leslie Nielsen, examines her. You know that he’s just pulling the old reproducing eggs magic trick that magicians learned in the 8th grade but it’s so out of place and played so seriously that it just gets funnier ever time you see it. [embedded content] The hatching eggs in Jurassic Park
During the initial tour of the Jurassic Park facility that takes place in the form of a Carousel of Progress-like ride, the crew somehow break out of the restraints so they can watch some baby dinosaurs hatch from the facility’s nursery. The hatching scene feels like a cute moment in a story that’s bound to get very dark, but it’s also an ominous warning to its cast of characters. Just like all of the safety systems in the dinosaur park, the robotic nursery provides the illusion of control over nature that, as Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum, correctly predicts, will inevitably fail to compete with the most powerful forces on Earth: life and the march of evolution.
[embedded content] The golden eggs in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
Veruca Salt’s demise couldn’t happen fast enough in the first Willy Wonka film. The little girl, played by Julia Dawn Cole, is a spoiled brat on a Trumpian level. She wants things simply because they don’t belong to her, and she has a limp-livered father who forks it over to her even if it’s at his own expense. The golden egg room was created for the movie instead of the nut-sorting room in Roald Dahl’s book where squirrels sort the good and bad nuts and determine that Veruca is a bad nut whom they drag into the incinerator. Presumably, the filmmakers changed this because it was harder to train squirrels to drag a human being into a flaming garbage chute, and there were enough dark images in the movie like the tunnel scene to ensure the audience of kids would need therapy for years to come.
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The Instagram Egg
The brown egg you’re looking at is perhaps the most famous egg in the world, maybe even more famous the Fabergé eggs, and it’s all thanks to (what else?) social media. In 2019, someone posted this simple photo of a single brown egg on a white background on Instagram and the Internet went nuts for it. The views and shares made it the second-most seen image on the platform, with 52 million likes that even topped Kylie Jenner’s birth announcement. The New York Times reported that advertising creator Chris Godfrey made the post to see if he could surpass Jenner’s record with something that “has no gender, race or religion. An egg is an egg, it’s universal.” He turned it into a Super Bowl ad to help raise awareness for mental health and the nonprofit Mental Health America.