When I moved into this house, these two tiny magnets were stuck to the side of the medicine chest:
I wondered for a moment about where these bow-tied frogs came from, but then got back to moving in. They’re still stuck to the medicine chest.
A few of my YouTube subscriptions regularly deliver vintage cartoons to me. One day, the mystery of the cravatted amphibian was solved when this was posted:
The frog magnets are Hoppity Hooper! In case you can’t make it out in the fuzzy video, here’s a still:
Wait. Who?
I’d never heard of him. And that’s saying something, because I love cartoons and have watched tons of them. Apparently, Hoppity’s the most overlooked creation of Jay Ward, who much more famously created Rocky and Bullwinkle. As a matter of fact, many of the side cartoons from the Rocky and Bullwinkle shows came to Hoppity Hooper’s show, too, including Peabody’s Improbable History, Fractured Fairy Tales, and Mr. Know-It-All.
If I had to guess, I’d say the magnets came out of a box of cereal. I used to have an entire set of similar, but larger, magnets I got from Freakies cereal in 1974. Anyone who was school-aged in 1974 knows what I’m talking about. Too bad I didn’t get my magnets off the fridge before it became my ex-wife’s fridge.
