Hopkin Green Frog

Hopkin Green Frog was an Internet phenomenon which emerged in late 2004.Hand-drawn fliers requesting the whereabouts of a lost frog were spotted in various places around Seattle during 2004. Although there were several revisions of the flier, the later popularised version included two drawings of the frog alongside some grammatically incorrect text written in what appears to be a child's script, which read as follows:

:

In September 2004, a scanned version of this letter began to circulate the internet. A digit of the original phone number was shortly after removed to discourage people from phoning up. Photoshopped riffs on the letter's content cropped up, much akin to the All Your Base phenomenon. These images involve the frog pictures and/or snippets of text from Terry's letter, pasted onto various pictures, from World War II propaganda posters to television news footage to photographs of aircraft carriers as well as eBay stills. Although humorous, many of these expressed concern (perhaps jokingly) for the child's loss. Lostfrog.org was set up in November 2004, which collected many of the photoshopped versions of the meme along with the original poster.

The internet community responded by researching the frog and its owner. Hopkin was found to be a toy frog, and the phone number was traced to the parents. An explanation of the poster's origin is available [http://mike.whybark.com/archives/001951.html here] . Terry was an autistic 16-year-old who had received the toy frog with a McDonald's "Animal Alley" Happy Meal. After losing the toy frog, he created the "lost" fliers and posted them around his neighborhood.

External links

* [http://lostfrog.org lostfrog.org]
* [http://mike.whybark.com/archives/001951.html Explanation of "Hopkin Green Frog" at whybark.com]
* [http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=2708 Flash animation] parodying the search for the frog as a hardboiled film noir detective story
* [http://www.flickr.com/groups/lostfrog/ Flickr group] about Hopkin Green Frog (photo sharing site)
* [http://www.shortandhappy.com/images/hopkinfrog.gifAlternate Hopkin poster] found by K. Thor Jensen