“One Froggy Evening” is possibly one of the best Warner Brothers cartoons of all time. It’s also the title of this print.

One Froggy Evening is a 1955 American Technicolor animated musical short film written by Michael Maltese and directed by Chuck Jones. The story goes like this:

A mid-1950s construction worker involved in the demolition of the “J. C. Wilber Building” pries off the top of the cornerstone and finds a metal box within. The unnamed man opens the box and finds, along with a commemorative document dated April 16, 1892, a live amphibian inside which turns out to be a frog that can sing and dance, complete with top hat and cane. After the frog suddenly performs a musical number there on the spot, the man sees an opportunity to cash in on the frog’s anthropomorphic talents and sneaks away from the demolition site with the frog and the box under his arm.

Every attempt the man makes to exploit the frog fails due to the audience revelation that the frog will perform only for its owner and nobody else. Worse, when any other individual becomes present, the frog immediately stops and devolves into an ordinary croaking frog. Remaining unaware of this reality, the man first takes the frog to a talent agent. When that fails, he uses all of his life savings to rent an abandoned theater to showcase the frog on his own (he is only able to get an audience with the promise of “Free Beer”). The frog performs atop a high wire behind the closed curtain, but as the curtain begins rising, he winds down the song and, by the time he is fully revealed to the crowd, he has again reverted to being an ordinary frog.

As a result of these failures, the man is now homeless and living on a park bench, where the frog still performs only for him. A policeman overhears the singing and approaches the man, who points to the frog as the singer. But when the frog again presents itself as ordinary, the policeman arrests the man for disturbing the peace; he is committed to a psychiatric hospital along with the frog who continues serenading the hapless patient. Following his release, the now haggard and destitute man, still carrying the box with the frog inside, notices the construction site where he originally found the box, and happily dumps it into the new cornerstone for the future “Tregoweth Brown Building” before running away, overjoyed to be rid of what has become his burden.

The cartoon’s timeline then jumps to nearly a century later. The Brown Building is itself being demolished using futuristic tools, and the box with the frog is discovered again by a 21st-century demolition man who, after also envisioning a cash bonanza, absconds with the frog, and the story begins again as the cartoon ends.