Ma Baby" and "I'm Just Wild About Harry", two Tin Pan Alley classics, to "Largo al Factotum", Figaro's aria from the opera Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville).

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 frog inside, who dons a top hat and cane.

The frog performs atop a high wire behind the closed curtain, while the man struggles to get an audience and succeeds with the promise of "Free Beer".

He joyously dumps it into the new cornerstone for the future "Tregoweth Brown Building" and runs away, finally rid of what has become his burden.

In a clip shown in the DVD specials for the Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Jones states that he started calling the character "Michigan Frog" in the 1970s.

Men from the Stone Age (during the erection of Stonehenge), Roman Empire, and American Revolutionary War, all of whom resemble the man from the original short, fail to profit off the singing frog, who still performs early 20th-century-style showtunes regardless of the time period.

[8] The premise of One Froggy Evening has some similarity to that of the 1944 Columbia Pictures film Once Upon a Time starring Cary Grant in which a dancing caterpillar is kept in a shoebox.

Once Upon a Time, in turn, was based on "My Client Curley", a 1940 radio play adapted by Norman Corwin from a magazine story by Lucille Fletcher.

[9] Ol' Rip, a horned toad "discovered" in an 1897 time capsule inside the cornerstone of the Eastland County, Texas courthouse in 1928, is also said to have inspired the premise.

Film critic Jay Cocks said that the short "comes as close as any cartoon ever has to perfection" in a 1973 Time profile of Chuck Jones.