Michigan J. Frog:
His Black Folktale Roots

Andrew Schulman
andrew@ora.com
January 21, 1997

 
As anyone with small children and a television in the United States probably knows, the Warner Bros. TV network has as part of its logo a top-hatted frog, known as Michigan J. Frog. This character plays about the same role for Warner Bros. as Mickey Mouse, dressed as the sorcerer's apprentice, plays for the Disney corporation: Michigan J. Frog stands for the WB vaudevillean style, just as Mickey the Sorcerer's Apprentice (combined sometimes with "pixie dust" from Tinkerbell in Peter Pan) evokes what is sometimes (usually by the corporation itself) called "Disney magic."
 
There's a certain irony to both these logo characters. Originally, Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer's apprentice (from the amazing 1939 film Fantastia) seems the essence of unsuccessful magic: he brings to life (literally animates) brooms to carry his master's water, but can not get them to stop, and is almost destroyed.
 
Similarly, Michigan J. Frog first appears in a context very different from what one would expect given his later employment in the WB logo. In the brilliant 1955 cartoon, One Froggy Evening, the singing frog with top hat and cane is a destructive force, bringing insanity and poverty to his discoverer, who tries to make money off him. This frog is a vaudevillean who can dance and sing songs such as "Hello Ma Baby" and "I'm Just Wild About Harry" -- but the catch is that he'll only perform for his owner. Everyone else just sees a plain old frog, whose only song is a fart-like ribbit. His origin (and, in fact, almost sole appearance) in this context would seem to make him unsuitable as a symbol for the entertainment business. Almost the entire point of his original appearance is his ability to undermine and destroy attempts to commercialize his entertainment.
 
So in the case of Disney we have an almost-suicidally incompetent magician where the incompetence and near suicide seem to have been forgotten, leaving behind only the aura of "magic," and in the case of Warner Bros. we have an entertainer who destroys his potential employers, but with the destruction seemingly forgotten.
 
Is this worth following up? Is this just what should be expected in the fast-paced, almost necessarily somewhat superficial, world of corporate-popular culture, or is there anything to be learned here?
 
I think there is. Aside from having an excuse to closely examine some great, well-loved animation, the fate of Michigan J. Frog (like that of Mickey as the Sorcerer's Apprentice) shows how images tend to pull away from their original context, and how little control a creator (even of such a humble thing as seven-minute cartoon) has over its later use. An image or story tends -- just like the brooms in the story of the sorcerer's apprentice, in fact -- to "take on a life of its own." 
 
Elsewhere, I'll follow up the evolution of the story of the sorcerer's apprentice, from its early appearance in a 2nd century satiric dialog by Lucian, to Goethe's late 18th century ballad "Zauberlehrling," to the late 19th century music by Dukas, to Disney's 1939 Fantastia, and its subsequent employment in, for example, the pseudo-anthropology of Carlos Castaneda.
 
Here, I'd like to closely examine the story of Michigan J. Frog. It turns out that the figure of The Singing Frog that Refuses to Sing has its roots in Afro-American and African folklore. Michigan J. Frog's most famous song, "Hello Ma Baby," has, in its own right, a fascinating story relating both to the history of technology and to the embarassing minstrel/blackface/"coon shouter" stage of the early 20th century. The whole theme of unreliable discoveries, cursed gifts, un-commercializable entertainments, and the refusal to perform for an audience, has connections to many other stories. All these themes are packaged up and somehow contained within the seemingly-simple figure of the singing-dancing frog in the WB television logo.
 
This is one of a series of web articles I am writing that will use folklore, mythology, literature, and the history of technology to examine "popular culture," particularly Disney and Warner Bros. animination, which form such a large part of contemporary culture. I'm using the phrase "WebLore," not only because I'll use the World Wide Web to publish (and, to a lesser extent, to research) this material, but more so because the area of popular culture is itself a web, an interconnected world: start with one place or character, diligently follow up the leads, and eventually you'll visit every other place and character in this world. So, more or less arbitrarily, let's start with the 1955 Warner Bros. cartoon, One Froggy Evening, and see where it leads us.
 

The popularity of Michigan J. Frog [1] is surprising, considering that he comes basically from single cartoon, One Froggy Evening (1955, directed by Chuck Jones; story by Michael Maltese; animation by Abe Levitow, Richard Thompson, Ken Harris, and Ben Washam). The cartoon is however the subject of in-jokes in several other cartoons,[2] and in the hilarious Mel Brooks film Spaceballs,[3] and Chuck Jones did a sequel in 1995??, Another Froggy Evening,[4] but few people have seen this. 

So it's just a single cartoon, nothing like the Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote cycle. Ah, but what a cartoon: it is a seven-minute masterpiece. One Froggy Evening appears as #5 in the wonderful book, The 50 Greatest Cartoons as Selected by 1,000 Animation Professions.

By the way, cartoons 1 through 4 are: What's Opera, Doc? (Warner Bros. 1957 Chuck Jones), Duck Amuck (Warner Bros. 1953 Chuck Jones), The Band Concert Disney (1935 Wilfred Jackson), Duck Dodgers in the 24-1/2th Century (Warner Bros. 1953 Chuck Jones). No. 6 is Gertie the Dinosaur (Winsor McKay ca. 1912). That Chuck Jones and Warner Bros. rather than Disney dominate this list is no surprise: see the fascinating biography of Jones, Flurry of Drawings, by literary critic Hugh Kenner, and see Jones's own books, Chuck Amuck and Chuck Reducks.[5]

The Internet Movie Database [6] has a nice, concise plot summary of One Froggy Evening: "A workman finds a singing frog in the cornerstone of an old building being demolished. But when he tries to cash in on his discovery, he finds the frog will sing only for him, and just croak for the talent agent and the audience in the theater he's spent his life savings on."
 
That's about it: not very promising-sounding as the basis for a lengthy article, much less as the basis for a corporate logo. But the cartoon is a masterpiece:


For Further Reading

These books can be directly ordered online from amazon.com. I am hoping to partially fund this web site by sales through amazon.com's "Associate Program."

50 Greatest CartoonsThe 50 Greatest Cartoons as Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals edited by Jerry Beck (published by Turner Broadcasting, 1994). Aside from the cartoons mentioned above, the book also features, for example, the infamous Bambi Meets Godzilla, Steamboat Willie, Gerald McBoing Boing (Dr. Seuss, 1951) and the racist classic Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (Warner Bros. 1943). An interview with the editor, Jerry Beck, is available online.

Flurry of Drawings Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings, by Hugh Kenner.

Chuck Amuck : The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist, by Chuck Jones.

Chuck Reducks: Drawing from the Fun Side of Life, by Chuck Jones Chuck Reducks  

 


Notes

[1] For what it's worth, he even has his own web page.

[2] There's a "Tiny Toons Adventure" on frog dissection, and apparently a Simpsons episode (Treehouse of Horror II).

[3] Spaceballs is mostly a spoof of Star Wars, but there's a scene spoofing Alien, and Michigan J. Frog makes a surprising appearance. See Spaceballs page.
 
[4] "Another Froggy Evening"
 
[5] Also see the web site http://www.chuckjones.com/, and the Chuck Jones biography and Leonard Maltin tribute at Cinemania.
 
[6] Internet Movie Database