One froggy evening

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One Froggy Evening - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

One Froggy Evening is an approximately seven-minute long Technicolor animated short film written by Michael Maltese and directed by Chuck Jones. The short was released on December 31, 1955 as part of Warner Brothers' Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. This cartoon also celebrates New Year's Eve 1956 since it was released on December 31.

Some critics and observers regard this cartoon short as the finest ever made. Steven Spielberg, in the PBS Chuck Jones biography Extremes & Inbetweens: A Life In Animation, called One Froggy Evening "the Citizen Kane of animated film." (Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume 5, Disc 2) In 1994 it was voted #5 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field. The film is currently ranked at IMDb as the second best short movie ever. In 2003 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

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Story

A mid-1950s construction worker involved in the demolition of an 1892 building finds a box inside a cornerstone. He opens it to reveal a (seemingly immortal) singing, dancing frog, complete with top hat and cane. The box also contains a deed dated April 16th, 1892. The man tries exploiting the frog's talents for money, but as it turns out, it will not perform in front of anyone else. For the rest of the cartoon, the man frantically tries to demonstrate the frog's abilities to the outside world (first by trying to get an agent to accept him, then by renting out a theater), all to no avail. Eventually he is homeless (after spending all his money renting the theater) and living on a park bench, where the frog still performs for him. A policeman overhears this and approaches the man, but after seeing him accuse the frog of the singing, he has the man committed to an asylum. Following his release, the haggard man dejectedly hides the box in a building that is under construction. The timeline then jumps to the year 2056 (100 years and at least 1 day after the cartoon's debut), where the building is demolished by futuristic ray guns, and the box with the frog is discovered yet again by a 21st century demolition man, starting the process all over.

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Censorship

• Airings of this cartoon on ABC and the WB cut the part where the man creates a "Free Beer" sign to rope in audience members into seeing the singing frog. The humor of that piece showed a bunch of drunks bullcharging into the theatre. The way it's cut on both channels makes it seem that the audience came in because of the "Free Admission" sign the man creates before the "Free Beer" sign.

• When the short was featured on the compilation movie Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales, the ending where the construction worker from 2056 finds the singing frog and makes off with it, in the hopes of exploiting it the same way the man from 1955 tried, was cut, making it seem as if the cartoon ended with the construction worker from 1955 getting rid of the frog and running off.

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