Basic Trope: A wizard or witch (usually, though not always, of the wicked variety) turns someone into a frog or toad.
- Straight: Hecate turns Bob into a toad.
- Exaggerated:
- Hecate turns Bob into a tadpole, and he will eventually become a frog.
- Hecate turns an entire town of Quirky Townsfolk into frogs and toads.
- Hecate turns the entire town into one huge frog, with each body part being a different person.
- Downplayed:
- Hectate made Bob frog-like.
- Hecate gives Bob the head of a frog.
- Justified:
- Hecate is angry with Bob for insulting her, or otherwise doing her wrong.
- Bob hurt Hecate's pet frog, and she wants to teach him empathy.
- Hecate believes Bob is a menace to society and he's less dangerous as a frog than as a human.
- Hecate is a Wicked Witch, who likes to turn people into amphibians For the Evulz.
- Bob disrupted Hecate's spell casting and got hit by the backfire.
- Inverted: Hecate turns a frog into a human being.
- Subverted:
- The camera pans over to Bob, lacerated and tied to the wall but still very much in his original form, as Hecate taunts him by waving the frog legs in front of his mouth.
- A flashback to the dream is initiated, showing that King Bob wasn't a frog, he was just a park ranger at 'his pond'.
- Hecate threatens to turn Bob into a frog and she fires a beam of magic at him, but then... nothing happens.
- Bob asks, "What are you gonna do, turn me into a toad?" To which Hecate replies that it's not practical, or violates the rules of magic, or something like that.
- Double Subverted:
- Eventually, Bob does get a morsel, but that ends up frogging him.
- Within the flashback, the entity that looks like park ranger Bob is actually a Mobile-Suit Human piloted by the real Bob, who is a frog.
- He keeps pushing her, and she turns him into a toad out of anger.
- But then... Bob starts turning into a frog over the next couple of hours.
- Parodied:
- Hecate casts the spell on a real Prince Charmless, who has to get a princess to fall in love with him...which won't be easy, not only because he's a toad, but because he's got a revolting personality.
- Hecate turns her ex-boyfriend into a toad for cheating on her...and tosses him into her next potion.
- Bob already is a toad.
- Hecate turns Bob into Kermit the Frog.
- Turns out every toad in existence is actually some poor chump who had a bad run with a witch somewhere.
- Zig Zagged: Hecate turns Bob into a fantasy creature that resembles a frog, but is shown to lack many traits that real amphibians have.
- Averted: Hecate does not turn anyone into any sort of amphibian.
- Enforced: Hecate, a character in a show for children, is not allowed to inflict any curses that would be too scary for kids, so she turns people into cute frogs.
- Lampshaded:
- "Shut up, or I'll turn you into a toad!"
- "You want to turn me into a toad? as if that's a new idea...
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited:
- Hecate uses the threat of being turned into a toad to get what she wants.
- Bob lets himself be turned into a toad so that he'll have an excuse to get a kiss from a princess.
- Defied:
- Hecate decides it's not worth her time and cancels the spell.
- Bob knocks the spell out of the air with his guitar before it can get to him.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied:
- Bob insults Hecate. Gilligan Cut to her enjoying a meal of frog legs and cream sauce.
- King Bob mentions a dream where Princess Pure (now his Queen) never visited his pond.
- Played For Laughs: Hecate is a very powerful magic user who could inflict curses so bad that they'd be a Fate Worse than Death, but she chooses to turn Bob into a frog because frogs are funny to her.
- Played For Drama: By turning him into a toad, Hecate reduces Bob to a harmless, short-lived creature with barely enough intelligence to keep himself alive. Bob's friends are devastated, knowing that their friend no longer remembers anything about his life and will likely die within a few years.
- Played For Horror: Hecate turns Bob into a frog because she wants to eat him, but she doesn't want to make it look like she is a cannibal.
Back to Bewitched Amphibians
