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Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Hello my baby, hello my darling...

 


Jeremiah was a bull frogWas a good friend of mineI never understood a single word he saidBut I helped him a-drink his wineAnd he always had some mighty fine wine

-- Joy to the World, Hoyt Axton, recorded by Three Dog Night

 As with most of my ideas, they begin with digressions about bits and pieces of things that have stuck in my brain. When I was a kid I saw a Warner Bros. cartoon call One Froggy Evening. It was released in 1955 but I didn't see it until the early 1960s. The story revolves around a construction worker who discovers a singing and dancing frog named Michigan J. Frog inside a cornerstone. The frog performs "Hello! Ma Baby" and other songs, but only when he's alone with the construction worker. When the worker tries to showcase the frog to others, the frog reverts to behaving like a normal, non-singing frog, making the worker appear to be crazy. 

Anyway, I loved Michigan J. Frog. Years later when Mel Brooks' spoof of Star Wars -- Space Balls -- came out there is a scene that plays off the scene in the movie Alien where an alien baby bursts out of a guy's stomach singing, "Hello! Ma Baby."  It totally cracked me up because I got the reference from the 1955 frog cartoon.

For whatever reason I was thinking about the frog the other day and asked my Google AI friend Gemini Cricket to give me some images of a dancing bullfrog with a top hat and cane.  Bullfrogs always make me think of the song "Joy to the World" that Hoyt Axton wrote but Three Dog Night recorded in 1970. So of course the image of a dancing bullfrog made me think of Jeremiah the bullfrog from the song. And I was thinking that if bullfrogs could talk they would probably be sick of people assuming their name was Jeremiah. So thus the design above. But who knows how many people under the age of 60 remember the song even though it was in the soundtrack of the Big Chill and Forest Gump.  And BTW, Hoyt Axton was in the movie Gremlins in 1984. He played Randall "Rand" Peltzer, the inventor and traveling salesman who buys the Mogwai, Gizmo from a shop in Chinatown as a Christmas present for his son.

This next design was just inspired because I thought the bullfrog looked pretty chill and cool. Gemini Cricket gave me the image of the bullfrog. I had to add the tongue and fly to complete the pun.


Being dressed in a tux made me think of the song "Puttin' on the Ritz" published in 1929. It's all about high-society dressing up and going out to party. Ritz makes me think of crackers. So I had an idea for this design.


It has a very Leroy Neiman quality to it. He was an artist known for his impressionistic style sports paintings in the 1970s and 1980s. Again few people will get that reference either.  But I love the decked out Ritz puttin' on the Ritz.

It dawned on me that my designs all come to fruition that way with one idea spawning another, kind of like the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" parlor game. If you are unfamiliar with the game, you start by choosing any actor from any film and then you link that actor to Kevin Bacon through other actors who have worked together in movies. You count the number of connections or "degrees," it takes to get from the chosen actor to Kevin Bacon and that determines the "Bacon Number."  For example, Tom Hanks appeared in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon, so his Bacon Number is 1. 

And to think all of these years writing my blog making connections to random things I thought I was just digressing.  But what I was really doing was creating.

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