It's Not Easy Being Green...or Yellow-Striped, Brown, Golden, or Even Piebald

Something discussed in the Moviehouse previously is the Hollywood rule of three: the long-held belief that celebrities die in threes. Whenever one star passes away, speculations arise on who the second and third will be. Maybe there's just something innate about humans that make us inclined to seek patterns, even when there are none to be found. According to John Hoopes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas, "Patterns in death...are things that help us try to understand the universe or reality in a way that makes sense of it. In general, we're very uncomfortable dealing with randomness."

Take comfort, fans of nonrandom patterns, as we offer this recent case in point. On September 24, 2016, actor Bill Nunn died of complications from leukemia. Best known for his early role as Radio Raheem in Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" (pictured below), Nunn had a recurring role as Joseph Robertson, the editor of The Daily Bugle, in director Sam Raimi's "Spider-Man" trilogy.

Then, on September 26, Herschell Gordon Lewis, an auteur of exploitation cinema whose pioneering slasher movies in the 1960s, including "Blood Feast" and "Two Thousand Maniacs" (pictured below), earned him the nickname the "Godfather of Gore," passed away at the age of 90.

And thirdly, September 26 also saw the demise of Toughie. Who, one might well ask, was Toughie? Toughie was a singular celebrity, the last living member of its species, the Rabbs' fringe-limbed treefrog, otherwise believed to be extinct in the wild. Toughie was captured as an adult in Panama in 2005 in an effort by researchers to rescue endangered species from a regional fungus deadly to amphibians.


Toughie Love

Originally from the lush rainforests of Panama, Toughie used
to spread his large webbed feet and could glide up to 30 feet
from his home in the treed canopy above.

Toughie (pictured above) resided at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, where he was placed in a special containment area dubbed the frogPOD, a bio-secure enclosure, closed to the public, used to house critically endangered species. Toughie sired tadpoles, but none survived. Toughie would have raised his own young in the wild, where males are the stay-at-home parents for this species.

After his female partner died in 2009, the only other known specimen in the world was another male, who was housed at Zoo Atlanta. That frog had to be euthanized in February 2012 due to health concerns.

Mark Mandica and son Anthony stand outside frogPOD.

Mark Mandica, Amphibian Conservation Coordinator at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, was Toughie's caretaker for many years. His son, Anthony, came up with the name Toughie "because he's the only one that made it." Mandica once said, "It's kind of nerve-racking taking care of him, knowing he's the last one of his kind."

Toughie's handler, Leslie Phillips (pictured above, eying a glass frog in Costa Rica), related at the time, "For me, it is incredibly motivating working with the Rabbs' frog. Having him here is a constant reminder of what can potentially happen to other species if we don't continue the conservation work that we do here..." The responsibility took its toll on her nerves as well. "It can be a challenging balance between leaving him alone as much as possible to avoid undue stress, while still providing the best possible care..."

According to Phillips, Toughie didn't like to be touched. He was handled sparingly, typically to be weighed once a week. Since he was brought in as an adult, researchers didn't know Toughie's age but estimated he was about 12 years old.

"He is just really cool," Leslie Phillips said of Toughie. "No other
frog is quite like him...He is a very handsome frog."

Leilani Munter, a race car driver and environmental activist (pictured below), reported on her visit to frogPOD in a touching blog from 2014 for The Huffington Post. "It's time for us to go," Munter concluded the piece with. "I say goodbye to Toughie, quietly wishing him frog dreams that bring back his distant memories of gliding over the rainforest canopy...The small brown frog will have peace and quiet for the remainder of his days...Mark will care for him until the last day when quietly, without any media hype, another species will silently disappear from our planet. His loss will go unnoticed by most, but not by Mark Mandica."

Some scientists estimate that Earth is losing approximately 30,000 animal species annually. Leilani Munter commented, "After over 300 million years on this planet - amphibians arrived before the dinosaurs - we are losing them at an alarming rate. Nearly 40 percent of all amphibians are imperiled or already extinct in the wild." Sadly, about 120 amphibian species, including frogs, toads, and salamanders, have disappeared since 1980.

Triadobatrachus, the oldest known member of frog lineage,
lived in what is now Madagascar during the Early Triassic
epoch 250 million years ago.

From the '80s onward, the decrease in amphibian population has been noted from locations all over the world. By 1993, more than 500 species of toads, frogs and salamanders were in decline. According to the website savethefrogs.com, "Amphibians are without a doubt the most endangered group of animals on the planet; nearly 1/3 of the world's species are on the brink of extinction."

Frog meets toad.

Short-bodied, tailless amphibians, frogs make up the order Anura, which is from Ancient Greek for "without" + "tail." At this point, you are probably asking, "What is the difference between frogs and toads?" If not, you should be. Here's your answer. Scientifically, toads are a classification of frog.

Frogs usually have moist skin often described as slimy. Toads have dry, bumpy skin. Frogs spend most of their lives in or near water. Toads spend more time on land and find their way into residential yards and gardens. By the way, horned toads (also called horned frogs) are neither toad nor frog but a genus of reptile (as pictured below, in "The Outlaw Josey Wales").

"The horned toad says we should go to Mexico."

Hocus Croak-us: Frogs and Toads Are Magic

Frogs, often found in folklore and fairy tales, were typically depicted as benign, ugly, and clumsy, but possessing hidden, frequently magical talents. Toads have a more sinister reputation. In European folklore, they are associated with witches as their familiars. Toxic secretions from their skin was brewed in potions or used in magical cures for human and livestock ailments. The often maligned toad was also linked to the Devil. In Milton's "Paradise Lost," Satan was portrayed as a toad pouring poison into Eve's ear (depicted below).

In the Bible itself, frogs, of course, were presented as a menacing threat when they swarmed up from the Nile to cover the land in the second Plague of Egypt. According to the book of Exodus, Moses tells Pharaoh, "This is what the Lord says: Let my people go...If you refuse to let them go, I will send a plague of frogs on your whole country. The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up to your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed, into the houses of your officials and on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs."

Director Ridley Scott depicts the plague of frogs
in his 2014 epic "Exodus: Gods and Kings."

Shakespeare associated both the toad and the frog with black magic in the famous scene from his 1606 tragedy "Macbeth" featuring the Weird Sisters as they toil over a bubbling witches brew. They boil a venomous toad in the cauldron before adding "eye of newt and toe of frog" to their "hell-broth."

"Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble."

Amphibian Appreciation

In Egypt, Greece, and Rome of ancient days, frogs symbolized fertility, not to mention licentiousness. Frogs figured in fables by Aesop, including "The Frogs Who Desired a King," in which the amphibians prayed for a king that would rule over them and keep order, and ended up with a stork who devoured his subjects (pictured below). The moral: Be sure you can better your condition before you seek to change.

"Battle of Frogs and Mice" was a parody of Homer's epic poem "The Iliad" written by an anonymous poet at the time of Alexander the Great.

This stirrup spout vessel was created by ancient Peruvians.

The Moche people of ancient Peru often depicted frogs in their art (pictured above). In Panama, local legend held that good fortune would come to those who spotted a Panamanian golden frog. Some believed that when these frogs died, they turned into a golden talisman known as huaca.

(Top) The Panamanian golden frog; (bottom) a golden huaca

Though extinct in the wild, Panamanian golden frogs remain an important cultural symbol and are often illustrated in the decorations of molas, the colorful traditional blouses made and by the Kuna people of Panama and Colombia (pictured below).

The toadstone was a legendary gemstone believed to be formed in the head of the amphibian. It was thought to be an antidote for poison, not unlike batrachite, a gemstone supposedly found in the heads of frogs.

Medieval etchings illustrate the proper
removal of toadstones and their practical
use as a curative.

Toadstones were actually the button-like fossilized teeth of Lepictotes, an extinct ray-finned fish from the Jurassic period. Deemed "stones that are perfect in form," toadstones were set by European jewelers into rings and amulets with supposed magical powers, from Medieval times into the 18th century (pictured below).

Shakespeare alluded to the toadstone in these lines from his 1599 comedy "As You Like It": "Sweet are the uses of adversity; / Which like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head."

Frogs and Toads Through the Pages

"The Frog Prince" (also known as "The Frog King") was the first story that appeared in the Brothers Grimm's collection of fairy tales. A spoiled princess reluctantly befriends the title creature after dropping her gold ball into its pond. In later retellings, the frog's magical transformation into a handsome prince is prompted by a kiss from the princess, but in the original written version, the frog's spell is broken when the disgusted princess throws it against the wall.

German artist Paul Meyerheim illustrated
"The Frog Prince" in 1889.

Jim Henson, internationally famed as the creator of the Muppets, produced and directed "The Frog Prince," an hour-long television special narrated by Kermit the Frog.

Kermit the Frog's nephew, Robin, portrays the title character
in "The Frog Prince," with Canadian actress Trudy Young
as Princess Melora. 

In 1982, "The Tale of The Frog Prince" was the premiere offering of the popular Peabody Award-winning series "Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre," starring Robin Williams and Teri Garr (pictured below), with Rene Auberjonois, Candy Clark ("American Graffiti"), and Michael Richards. Monty Python's Eric Idle wrote the teleplay and directed and narrated the episode.

The classic Brothers Grimm fairy tale was given contemporary twists in Disney's "The Princess and the Frog" (pictured below), a 2009 throwback to traditional animation, featuring the voices of Anika Noni Rose (who played singer Lorrell Maya Robinson in "Dreamgirls") and Bruno Campos (best known as plastic surgeon Quentin Costa on the TV series "Nip/Tuck"). Roger Ebert gushed, "No 3-D! No glasses! No extra ticket charge! No frantic frenzies of meaningless action! And...good gravy! A story! Characters! A plot! This is what classic animation once was like!"

"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," written in 1865 (illustrated below), was Mark Twain's first big success as a published writer, garnering national attention. An old-timer in a mining camp relates the tale of an incurable gambler named Jim Smiley who wagers that his frog, Dan'l Webster, can out-jump any other frog in the titular county in California's famed Gold Country. Smiley is outdone by a rival who surreptitiously pours lead shot down Dan'l Webster's throat.

A frog-jumping contest has been held annually in Calaveras County since 1928. The endangered California red-legged frog, once feared extinct but rediscovered in 2003, is barred from competing. A frog named Rosie the Ribeter holds the longest jumping record at 21 feet, 5 3/4 inches, set in 1986. Each year's winner is honored with a brass plaque set in the sidewalk of the town of Angel Camp's Frog Hop of Fame.

In 1906, naturalist, conservationist, and children's author Beatrix Potter, best known as the creator of Peter Rabbit, wrote and illustrated The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher (pictured below). The title character, a frog who lives in a damp, "slippy-sloppy" house amongst buttercups by a pond, sets out to catch minnows for a dinner with friends but nearly gets swallowed himself by a large trout. He ends up serving his guests roasted grasshopper in ladybird sauce, "which frogs consider a beautiful treat," the narrator concludes, "but I think it must have been nasty!" The story was Potter's nostalgic homage to the lazy summers her father and his companions spent fishing at rented country estates in Scotland.

Frog and Toad were the main characters in a series of children's books written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel, published in the '70s, beginning with 1970's Frog and Toad Are Friends. Brown-hued Toad, short and stout in stature, is the serious, uptight half of the duo, while the taller, green-shaded Frog is friendlier and more laid-back. Each book contained five easy-to-read, humorous, sometimes poignant adventures and usually ended with a story demonstrating Toad's dependency on Frog's friendship.

Scottish-born writer Kenneth Grahame populated his 1908 classic of children's literature, The Wind in the Willows, with a variety of woodland creatures, notably Mole, Rat, Mr. Badger, and most memorably, Mr. Toad, the wealthy scion of Toad Hall and an incorrigibly reckless enthusiast of horseless carriages.

British illustrator E.H. Shepard was equally
renowned for his illustrations for A.A. Milne's
Winnie-the-Pooh books as for The Wind in the
Willows, which included this rendition of Mr. Toad.

The Wind in the Willows was a unique combination of mysticism (a rarity in children's literature), madcap adventures, morality, and friendship, set in the Thames River valley, where author Grahame himself, not unlike his characters, idled away summer hours on the water, "simply messing about in boats."

Webbed Sites

One of the most visible frogs to modern audiences is Kermit, featured on "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," in motion pictures, television specials, commercials, and public service announcements. Initially voiced by creator Jim Henson (until his untimely death in 1990), Kermit the Frog was introduced in 1955 on "Sam and Friends," a local programming children's show created by Henson and his future wife, Jane, for a Washington, D.C. TV station. Since Henson's passing, Kermit has been performed by veteran Muppeteer Steve Whitmire.

In 2013, Kermit the Frog played "Dueling Banjos" with Steve Martin.

The same year that Kermit the Frog made his debut, 1955, famed animator Chuck Jones directed "One Froggy Evening" for Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies, which introduced the ragtime-sometime opera-singing frog originally known as Enrico but renamed Michigan Frog by Jones in the '70s (from a song Jones co-wrote called "The Michigan Rag"). He became Michigan J. Frog after Jones was interviewed by critic-screenwriter Jay Cocks. Michigan J. Frog was the official mascot of The WB Television Network from its inception in 1995 until 2005.

Speaking of amphibian mascots, in 1972, an oddly urban character called Dig'Em Frog became the advertising mascot for Kellogg's Honey Smacks cereal. Originally called Sugar Smacks, the name was changed in the '80s while the overloaded sugar content remained the same; according to a 2008 comparison by Consumer Reports, Honey Smacks and Post Golden Crunch had the highest sugar content, more than 50 percent by weight, of 27 cereals. Since the cereal was introduced in 1953, a number of mascots have appeared on the box, including Quick Draw McGraw in the early '60s. In 1986, Dig'Em was replaced by Wally the Bear, definitely an animal more associated with honey.

The most successful international alcohol-related advertising campaign - even more so than the popular Miller Lite "Great Taste - Less Filling" commercials of the '70s with Rodney Dangerfield, Bob Uecker, and Mickey Spillane - was the series of ads spotlighting the Budweiser Frogs, three lifelike puppets named "Bud," "Weis," and "Er." The trio of monosyllabic amphibians was introduced in a break during Super Bowl XXIX in 1995. The award-winning commercial and its follow-ups were directed by Gore Verbinski, who made the first three "Pirates of the Caribbean" pictures.

Interestingly, Gore Verbinski turned his attention to toads when he directed the hit computer-animated comedy western "Rango" in 2011, starring Johnny Depp as the voice of a stranded pet chameleon and set in an Old West town populated by Mojave Desert critters. The film featured two toads, one of them being Buford, a Sonoran desert toad (also known as the Colorado River toad) who's the bartender at the Gas Can Saloon (pictured below, with Johnny Depp's Rango). Buford was voiced by veteran standup comic Blake Clark, a familiar presence in numerous Adam Sandler movies.

In other media, Japanese entertainment conglomerate Konami and Tokyo-based Sega introduced the video game "Frogger," in 1981, in which arcade players guided frogs back to their home by crossing a busy, multi-laned highway and a hazard-riddled river.

A decade later, British game developer Rare launched the "Battletoads" franchise, a series of beat 'em up games featuring a trio of anthropomorphic amphibians: poor man's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who, instead of bearing the names of Renaissance painters, are disturbingly named after skin blemishes Rash, Zits, and Pimple (pictured below, with their nemesis, Dark Queen).

Sam Gross is a cartoonist (familiar to fans from his signature "S. Gross"), whose single panel cartoons have appeared in numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and Cosmopolitan. Now in his early 80s, Gross has been cartooning since 1962. Once a week, he sits down to draw and "trip," claiming he doesn't draw for the magazines or newspapers but for himself. He averages 16 to 17 drawings a week.

His often twisted world, according to Richard Gehr in The Comics Journal, "is populated in large part by the handicapped, the homeless, and the slightly horrific, all of whom he humanizes with deft strokes and subtle halftones." And frogs, lots of frogs. His most popular cartoon, without a doubt, was the frogs' legs gag that appeared in National Lampoon magazine, where he was cartoon editor.

Pond Stars

Join us now as we hop through some of our amphibians' finest moments on the screen, starting in 1922 with "Witchcraft Through the Ages" (pictured below), a Swedish-Danish co-production that proved to be the most expensive Scandinavian silent film ever made. Although it was acclaimed in its homeland, the movie was banned in the U.S. and heavily censored elsewhere for its graphic depictions of torture, nudity and perversion. Writer-director Benjamin Christensen also portrayed a very convincing Satan in the picture that included a scene of a live frog and snake, along with dried fingers, being tossed into a witch's potion.

"The Big Parade," a 1925 silent film directed by King Vidor, follows the travels of a young rich American who enlists in the Army during World War I and is shipped overseas to France, where he experiences the brutalities of trench warfare and falls in love with a French girl. In one poignant scene, he tries to impress her with a little frog he caught in a stream (pictured below).

Although other antiwar movies preceded it, "The Big Parade" was remarkable for neither glorifying war nor ignoring its bloody toll. Becoming one of the biggest hits of the 1920s, "The Big Parade" is sometimes regarded as the most successful film of the silent era.

Directed by the venerable Ingmar Bergman and set in medieval Sweden, "The Virgin Spring" (1960) is a brooding tale of jealousy and revenge as an otherwise zealously Christian landowner (played by Bergman regular Max von Sydow) doles out merciless, definitely unchristian vengeance against the men who raped and murdered his daughter. Earlier in the story, the victim's pregnant servant girl, a pagan who is secretively envious of the daughter, prepares her a toad sandwich. The unfortunate sandwich filler is pictured here.

Although it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, "The Virgin Spring" was Ingmar Bergman's most controversial film. In his review for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther wrote, "Mr. Bergman has stocked it with scenes of brutality that, for sheer unrestrained realism, may leave one sickened and stunned." Maybe it's not all that surprising that "The Virgin Spring" was the inspiration for horror maven Wes Craven's 1970 directing debut, the seminal slasher film "The Last House on the Left," minus the hapless toad.

(Top) Frogs literally rain from the sky in 1999's "Magnolia,"
directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (best known for "There Will
Be Blood") and (bottom) overrun Sydney, Australia, in a freak
rainstorm in 1977's "The Last Wave," directed by Peter Weir
(best known for "Dead Poets Society").

"Cannery Row" (1982), a picaresque drama starring Nick Nolte as a marine biologist called Doc and Debra Winger as a prostitute named Suzy DeSoto, was based on a pair of novels by John Steinbeck and directed by David S. Ward, who won an Oscar for his screenplay for "The Sting" and wrote and directed "Major League." On an epic hunt in "Cannery Row" (pictured below), the local community of hobos capture hundreds of frogs to sell for money to pay for a surprise party for Doc.

In 1986, "Poltergeist" director Tobe Hooper remade the 1953 sci-fi classic "Invaders from Mars," featuring Karen Black and her real-life son Hunter Carson as the only townspeople aware that aliens are turning humans into emotionless drones. The kid from the original film, Jimmy Hunt, had a cameo in the remake as the police chief in a cast that included Timothy Bottoms, Laraine Newman, Bud Cort, and Louise Fletcher as a schoolteacher assimilated by the Martians who develops an appetite for live frogs (pictured below).

Only 11 years earlier, Louise Fletcher won the Academy Award
as Best Actress for "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

One web wit succinctly summed up the tongue-in-cheek sci-fi flick "Hell Comes to Frogtown" (1988) thus: "Wrestler Roddy Piper is a post-apocalyptic government sex machine with an exploding chastity belt who fights chainsaw-wielding three-penised bipedal frog mutant militants. What more could you want!" The cult film spawned two direct-to-video sequels, neither with Roddy Piper.

In "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2000), the Coen brothers' quirky retelling of Homer's "Odyssey" in a Depression era setting, when prison chain gang escapees Everett (George Clooney) and Delmer (Tim Blake Nelson) find a toad hiding in the shed clothing of their friend Pete (John Turturro), they think river Sirens turned him into the toad (pictured below). They put their pal in a box to care for him.

The titular sisters of the charming and acclaimed 2003 animated film "The Triplets of Belleville" are eccentric music hall singers from the 1930s who use dynamite and hand grenades to catch frogs for their dinners (pictured below). Written and directed by French comic creator and animator Sylvain Chomet, the film was nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature but lost to "Finding Nemo."

"Apocalypto" (2006), the fourth film directed by Mel Gibson, dramatizes the flight of Jaguar Paw, a Meso-American tribesman, as he escapes human sacrifice by Mayan marauders and rescues his trapped family. Pursued through the jungle, Jaguar Paw devises a number of clever methods to eliminate the warriors one by one. At one point, he improvises a blowgun armed with darts dipped in poison from the skin of a toad (pictured below).

The year 2006 also the release of "Pan's Labyrinth," written and directed by visionary filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. Set in a turbulent post-Civil War Spain, during the early years of Francisco Franco's totalitarian regime, the dark fairy tale centers on the young, bookish stepdaughter of a sadistic army officer who escapes into an eerie fantasy world, where she must perform a series of tasks to achieve immortality as a reincarnated princess. A giant toad in its underground lair holds a key that is vital in the girl's quest.

Roger Ebert, who erringly called the toad a frog, remarked,
"When the giant frog delivers up a crucial key in its stomach,
it does so by regurgitating its entire body,
leaving an empty frog skin behind."

Roger Ebert, who called "Pan's Labyrinth" "one of the greatest of all fantasy films," noted, "It's a fairy tale of such potency and awesome beauty that it reconnects the adult imagination to the primal thrill and horror of the stories that held us spellbound as children."

The year 2006 was a big one for amphibians on the screen. DreamWorks was responsible for the computer-animated adventure "Flushed Away," featuring the voice of Hugh Jackman as a pampered pet rat that ends up - just like the title says - flushed away, by a rival sewer rat, into the West London sewage system, where he meets a cute scavenging rat, voiced by Kate Winslet. Her evil archenemy in the subterranean conduits is The Toad (pictured below), voiced by the actor who played opposite Hugh Jackman's Wolverine as Magneto in the "X-Men" movies, Ian McKellen (equally noteworthy as Gandalf in director Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" trilogies).

Moroccan-born Spanish-French actor Jean Reno (a familiar face - and voice - in a number of films, including "Leon: The Professional," "Mission: Impossible," "Godzilla," "Ronin," and "The Da Vinci Code") performed the voice of Le Frog, The Toad's French cousin, in "Flushed Away."

Ultimately, our favorite guilty pleasure in lily-pad multiplexes has to be 1972's "Frogs," one among many nature-strikes-back B-movies from the '70s, such as "Grizzly," "Day of the Animals," and "Kingdom of the Spiders." Faded Hollywood leading man Ray Milland (best known for his Oscar-winning role as the alcoholic writer in director Billy Wilder's "The Lost Weekend" and as the homicidal husband in Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder") played the crotchety patriarch of an "ugly rich" family who couldn't care less about the effects the pollution cranked out by his paper mill or the pesticides pumped out on his private island in the Florida Everglades have on the environment.

Early in his career, Sam Elliott (before he sprouted his trademark horseshoe cookie-duster) costarred in "Frogs" as a wildlife photographer who ends up stranded on the island, where, inevitably, he develops a relationship with the patriarch's lovely blonde daughter, played by Joan Van Ark (best known as Val Ewing on the primetime soap opera "Knots Landing").

It's a little known fact that Sam Elliott, pictured here with his
"Frogs" costar, Joan Van Ark, made his film debut as a card player
(sans 'stache) in "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,"
 featuring his future wife, Katharine Ross.

On their isolated, swampy estate, Milland and his upper-crust family are targeted for elimination by the local fauna, including birds, rattlesnakes, gators, snapping turtles, water moccasins, crabs, and tarantulas. Milland himself falls victim to frogs, although, according to The New York Times critic Vincent Canby, what exactly the frogs do to him is never made clear: "Perhaps they thump him to death."

Directed by George McCowan (who made the third and last theatrical sequel to "The Magnificent Seven," 1972's "The Magnificent Seven Ride," starring Lee Van Cleef), the movie's ads proclaimed, "Today - the Pond! Tomorrow - the World!"


Don't Bogart That Toad, My Friend

We leave our amphibian friends with one of the more interesting aspects of, in particular, toads. Urban myths dating back to the 1970s maintained that people could get high by licking the skin of certain toads. In fact, psychoactive toad is the term used for toads from which substances in the family of bufotoxins can be de derived. To obtain these substances, the toxin is "milked" from the animal's poison glands by stroking the toad under its chin to trigger the defensive secretions.

The poison can be used recreationally for its psychedelic effects, but there have been deaths reported as the result of people attempting to get high from cane toad poison. Especially deadly, the golden poison frog (pictured below), native to Colombia, has enough toxin on average to kill 10 to 20 people or 10,000 mice.

A December 2009 episode of the tabloid TV show "1000 Ways to Die" dramatized the demise of two idiots who, looking for the ultimate high, went to Peru in search of the Colorado River toad (remember Buford the bartender in "Rango").

The Colorado River toad is endemic to the American Southwest
and northern Mexico, not Peru in South America.

What the stoners picked up from a stream was a yellow-banded poison dart frog instead. They licked the frog's secretions, and the poison soon paralyzed both men and shut down their hearts.

The yellow-banded poison dart frog is a frog, not a toad
and looks nothing like the Colorado River toad.

In a June 2000 episode of "Family Guy" titled "Let's Go to the Hop," a Colombian cartel plane is struck by lightning during a heavy storm over Quahog in Rhode Island and crashes, releasing its cargo of psychoactive toads. A toad-licking craze spreads throughout the high school (pictured below), prompting Peter Griffin to pose undercover as cool student Lando Griffin, who sings the anti-drug anthem "Gotta Give Up the Toad": "Gotta give it up / It's no joke / Buddy, give it up / Or you'll croak."

According to Quahog TV news anchor Tom Tucker, "Toad-licking is
also known as lily-padding, frenching the prince and doing Kermit."

In "Missionary: Impossible," a February 2000 episode of "The Simpsons," Homer, on the run after making a bogus pledge to PBS, ends up as a missionary in Micronesia in the South Pacific. Lolling in a hammock, he picks up toads at random and licks them to get high.

In another episode, Homer resorts to licking toads after being kicked out of Moe's Tavern. In yet one more episode, Lenny Leonard, Homer's coworker at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, leaves a drug test and licks a psychoactive toad from his pocket.

Not exactly a psychoactive toad, but Hypnotoad (pictured above), a recurring character on the animated Fox series "Futurama," was a large alien with pulsating, multicolored, psychedelic eyes that emits a loud, ominous humming sound.

Jon Stewart: "If you lick a frog, you get crazy thoughts?"
Kermit the Frog: "If you lick a frog, you're crazy before you started."