The Frogman

Submission 39,456

About

Benjamin Grelle, better known online as "The Frogman," is an Internet comedian and blogger who has gained a significant following on Tumblr since 2009.

Online History

Grelle created his Tumblr blog thefrogman.me^[1] on April 19th, 2009. His first post^[2] featured a LOLcat image macro of a tuxedo cat with a sleeping dog in the background, with the caption containing a reference to the classic board game Clue.

In 2010, some of Grelle’s blog posts began drawing attention from other geek culture Tumblr bloggers including Cybergata^[3] and Rampaged Reality.^[4] On October 26th of that year, he launched a Facebook fan page^[5] for the site, which has accrued more than 7,500 likes as of September 2013. In 2011, Grelle wrote several guest posts for the internet humor site Slacktory^[6] and his blog was named one of the best Tumblr blogs of the year by Buzzfeed.^[7] Around that same time, The Daily Dot^[8] ran a feature story on Grelle, highlighting the blogger as an original content producer and animated GIF maker^[10] with 70,000-strong Tumblr followers. In February 2012, The Frogman got a dog named Otis the Corgi^[16] who has since made several appearances in his blog posts.

Sad Frogman

On November 4th, 2011, Grelle posted a series of photos^[11] demonstrating his reactions to learning the ending of Victor Hugo's 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame after watching the animated Disney movie version. While he initially was excited about the happy ending in the Disney film (shown below, left), he is left shocked after reading about the main characters' deaths in Hugo's version (shown below, right). The post was featured on Tumblr's curated LOL tag and has gained more than 61,000 notes as of September 2013.

Shortly after it was posted to Tumblr, someone reposted the image set to 9gag, where another user suggested his final, defeated face should become a vectorized rage comic character template. Initially called Sad Bear Guy, the character was used in image macros to express disappointment or sadness. That December, Grelle responded^[12] via his blog, disappointed with the generic name given to the image.

Dispute with Imgur

After seeing his content repeatedly posted on Reddit without attribution, Grelle decided to contact Imgur^[13] on August 10th, 2012, seeking either attribution on all of his posts or a check for $10,000, what he considered his share of the ad revenue Imgur was making from his unsourced content. Four days later, he received a message from Sarah Schaaf, Imgur's communications director, congratulating him on his popularity and stating that an attribution system was in the works. The story was featured on The Daily Dot^[15] the following day. As of September 2013, Imgur has implemented a sourcing system that scrapes some data from image's URL.

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