phroag

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Dan’l Webster (Daniel) is a character from the short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, written by Mark Twain. The story describes Jim Smiley, a man who spends his life betting on everything he can. After failing to find success with other money making schemes he decides to train a frog to become the best jumper this side of the country has ever seen, and by golly had he done it. Smiley started challenging people on the street and in bars to find him a frog that could jump farther than his Dan’l Webster. He won money left and right, our hero frog was unbeatable. That is until someone fed him quail shot when Smiley wasn’t looking, Dan’l couldn’t even move one inch anymore. That’s okay though, you’re still the best jumper in our hearts Dan’l Webster :)

Mark Twain was apparently so appalled by a French translation of this short story that he took it upon himself to translate it back to English, word for word, maintaining the French syntax exactly. He did give it a new title though: “The Jumping Frog: in English, then in French, then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil”.

sources: Leire Ramos Castro (above), flyer advertising Mark Twain's lecture on feb. 7 1873, artist unknown (below)

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The Frogettes (not to be confused with the Frogettes), are a group of singing and dancing frogs from the video game series Rhythm heaven. The are family who make their money performing. In the game the player plays as one of the background dancers, shaking their hips along with the rhythm, lest they disappoint their family.

Someone once dropped the bandleader's saxophone in a pond. I could not find any fanart of this so I took the courtesy to make it myself :)

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𓆏, the Egyptian hieroglyph for frog. Unsurprisingly this hieroglyph was used to represent frogs, but it was also used to represent Heqet (𓎛𓈎𓏏𓆏), the goddess of fertility. Frogs represented fertility because they were associated with the yearly flooding of the Nile.

This hieroglyph was also used to represent the saying 'wehem ankh', meaning 'repeating life' or 'live again'. This was put after the names of the deceased as a well-wishing (pdf source).

Image source

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The whale frog, from the game The Legend of Heroes VI: Trails in the Sky. This one, being a female specimen, can summon a male counterpart during battle, combined with their high health makes them foes worthy of your full attention.

Source: https://www.crimsontear.com/gaming/loh-trails-in-the-sky-1/monster-guide/whale-frog-female

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Keroppi, or Kerokerokeroppi. This young frog was once one of Sanrio’s most popular characters. He lives with his friends and family at Donut Pond and spends most of his days doing normal kid things like playing baseball and resolving international conflicts.

Interestingly Keroppi is the only Sanrio character that has ever gotten an officially licensed pachinko machine made from it. It is possible that there was a miscommunication and that Sanrio thought they were signing off on a different Keroppi product.

Ps: supposedly keroppi’s design was chosen after sanrio held a design contest in 1987. If someone has more information on this or even a sketch of the original design I would love to know.

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Rash, from the Battletoads videogame series. Along with his friends Pimple and Zitz they were once human, being turned into humanoid toads and teleported to a different planet after playing an experimental vr version of Battletoads. From that point on they were stuck fighting the Dark Queen and her evil hoards until they defeat her once and for all.

In this phroag cataloag we cataloag phroags and toads equally.

Source: assorted sprites from Battletoads, Battletoads in Battlemaniacs and Battletoads Arcade

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Aogaeru, a greedy little frog spirit and worker in the bathhouse from Spirited Away. He spends most of the movie being swallowed by No-Face, who takes on several characteristics of Aogaeru, including his greed, his voice and his frog legs.

Most male workers in the bathhouse are frog spirits and most female workers are slug spirits. No explicit explanation is given in the movie, but it might be a nod to The Tale of the Gallant Jiraiya, a Japanese folktale featuring the toad-riding Jiraiya and the slug-riding Tsunade. They had frog and slug based magic abilities respectively, more on them in the future.

Slug-Riding Woman, Frog-Riding Man by Utagawa Kunisada (1852)

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The frog from the Billie Eilish music video for My Future, likely based on the black rain frog. The frog finds itself on top of a lily pad, a curious sight, because black rain frogs are a burrowing species and they generally avoid open water. This little lad seems unbothered by their incongruous nature though, just as unbothered as they are by the forest surrounding them, which is a far cry from the shrub lands on the coasts of South Africa, where black rain frogs tend to reside.

Art by Chop Studio

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Michigan J. Frog, a jolly frog who enjoys spending his time singing and dancing. He particularly likes doing this in front of an unsuspecting victim, who is inadvertently amazed at the miraculous abilities of this frog, but when they try to show him off to others Michigan will mock them by refusing to do anything a boring old frog couldn’t do.

Michigan J. Frog only appeared in a select few animations, but regardless got picked as the mascot of the tv network the WB. He did this from 1995 to 2005 when he was tragically killed off by the network for surpassing his usefulness.

Perhaps it is for the best though, frog characters like our Michigan here were in many cases a more socially acceptable continuation of the minstrelsy shows that came before, and Michigan in particular was modeled after blackface vaudeville actor Bert Williams. No doubt this blog will feature more frogs that are perhaps best left in the past

Source: all three are from the original Michigan J. Frog animation here

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Kermit, perhaps the most famous frog of all time, here depicted in his earliest iteration as one of the friends from the tv-show Sam & Friends.

While created in 1955 his design was not finalized until 1969's Hey Cinderella! where Kermit sported his iconic pointy collar for the first time. Initially he was conceptualized more as a lizard-like creature, but became more and more amphibian-like over a number of years.

Illustration source: cover of the Imagination Illustrated book, illustrator unknown, but presumed to be adapted from Jim Henson's sketches out of his archive