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.
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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