Where To Watch
The real horned toad behind Michigan J. Frog
Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my horny toad!
Did you know that Michigan J. Frog was inspired by a real frog?
It all began in 1897 when a four-year-old boy, Will Wood, caught a Texas horned lizard in Eastland County, Texas. Horned lizards are often called "horned toads" or "horny frogs," but they are lizards, not frogs or toads. Wood's father decided to test the old Texan legend that horned toads could live for many years in hibernation and put the creature in a time capsule with other items. They buried the time capsule in the cornerstone of the Eastland courthouse and forgot about it for thirty years. In 1928, the courthouse was being torn down, and construction workers found the time capsule. Suddenly, everyone remembered that a lizard had been buried alive in there.
A crowd of 1,500 people gathered to see if the horned lizard survived 31 years of hibernation in the time capsule.
Boyce House, a newspaper reporter at the event, wrote that "Eugene Day, thrust his hand into the cavity and lifted a flat, dust-covered toad...The pastor handed the creature to Judge Pritchard, who dangled it with a hind leg that all might see. Suddenly, the other hind leg twitched: the frog was alive!"
Within a few minutes, the toad began to blink, breathe, and fully come back to life. While scientists and zoologists debated if a horned lizard could survive that long, the media frenzy had already begun. The town named the lizard Ol' Rip after Rip van Winkle, the fictional character who fell asleep for 20 years. And before scientists could analyze him, Ol' Rip was already off on tour.
Ol' Rip went to Dallas, St. Louis, New York City, and even Washington, D.C., where he got to meet President Calvin Coolidge! He was a star! But then he died about six months later of pneumonia, and he was preserved as a museum exhibit in the new Eastland courthouse, the very spot where he had once been buried alive. Ol' Rip's troubles did not end with his passage into the spirit realm, because his body was stolen and held for ransom twice. Between the two thefts, Ol' Rip's hind leg fell off. After the second theft, the body was returned with all four feet, leading locals and fans to believe that the recovered specimen was a fake.
Whether Ol' Rip resides in the Eastland courthouse or is still in a thief's possession, his story reached the ears of Looney Tunes writer Michael Maltese, who was inspired to write One Froggy Evening. The cartoon features a construction worker at a demolition site finding a time capsule from 1892 with a live Michigan J. Frog inside. Michigan sang his way through Looney Tunes cartoons and eventually became the mascot for The WB channel. Through Michigan, the story of Ol' Rip still lives on.
