The difficult thing about the reanimated frog exam is convincing the professor your frog really does put on a top hat and sing "Ragtime Gal."
Specially when, even if it actually does, the professor for some reason loathes that song.
Am I missing something?
It's an old, old Loony Toon, pre-dating most if not all of the famous characters from the Warner Brothers animation studios. I think it was a sort of redress of an old Kipling- or Poe-written short morality story. Basically a penniless man finds a shoebox on his doorstep. Inside is a frog who puts on a top hat, dances and sing the 1920s hit song 'Ragtime Girl'. Certain that this is his ticket to fame and fortune, he decides to put the frog on Broadway. He easily impresses an agent with his pet's 'talent' and a show is arranged.
Unfortunately... the frog will not perform in front of crowds or even
small groups. The agent is ruined and turns his anger on the poor man who loses what few possessions he has to cover the agent's losses. All he has left is that
damn frog. Too broken even to seek revenge on the cursed creature, he simply leaves it on someone's doorstep in the same shoebox with the same despairing note that he had originally found on it: "I have nothing left except what you will find in this box; may it bring you better luck than it did me." So the cycle repeats.
It was the genius of the director of this short that the cartoon comes across as incredibly funny and you laugh at the moment of the agent's humiliation and the man's ruin. Yet... when you
think about it... it's a horror story very much in the tradition of Poe with the protagonist in the end having nothing left but his life and cursing the fact that he has that much. Indeed, on repeat viewings, you can't help but wonder if, as the man shuffles off of the screen, he is now going to end his life as had
all of the frog's previous keepers. Of course, in the tradition of Poe and Kipling, in the end the disaster was self-inflicted. If he'd just kept the frog as a pet or even if he'd
killed the thing for what little sustenance it could give him for one day, he would not have been destroyed. His own greed and desperation for wealth led him to disaster.
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, western animation was every bit as dark and gothic as the most hardcore modern-day animé.