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Amphibians in Movies   O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This great Cohen Brothers farce, loosely based on The Odyssey of Homer, shows us the adventures of Ulysses "Everett" McGill and his companions Delmar and Pete, three convicts in 1930s Mississippi who escape a chain gang and travel to Everett's home where they hope to recover some robbery money that was buried before Everett went to prison. Among the strange characters they encounter on their journey are three beautiful women who are doing their laundry in a stream and singing a hypnotic song. (They represent the Sirens of Greek and Roman mythology, seductive women who lured sailors with their singing into sailing too close to dangerous rocks where they wrecked their ships. Ulysses, in The Odyssey, famously ties himself to a mast so he can hear their song.) The women sing a lullaby and writhe seductively in their clinging wet clothing. Then they give the men moonshine and then we can only imagine what happens afterwards because all we see next is Everett and Delmar unconscious on the banks of the stream. Delmar wakes up and finds Pete's clothing spread out on the ground with no Pete inside them. We see something pulsing under Pete's shirt and Delmar thinks the Sirens made Pete disappear, leaving nothing but his beating heart. Then we see that it's not a heart beating, it's a frog hopping, as it crawls out of the shirt. Delmar screams and says that the Sirens loved him up and turned him into a Horney toad. The frog then hops into the river. Delmar jumps in after it and catches the frog then talks to him. After that, he and Everett get in their car and drive away.  After a long silence Everett says dryly "I'm not sure that's Pete." (One of the funniest lines in the movie!) Later at dinner, Everett tells Delmar that Pete got what he deserved for fornicating with some whore of Babylon. Then he tries to order some nits or grubs from the waitress to feed the frog. Much later, after the scene with the Cyclops shown below, they are surprised to see Pete in a movie theater, once again part of a chain gang. They explain to him that they thought he was a toad. After he's free from prison, they explain it to him again and he tells them they never did turn him into a toad. Later Everett and Delmar meet an evil Bible salesman with an eye patch named Big Dan. (He represents the Cyclops, a giant one-eyed mythological creature that also appears in The Odyssey.) Delmar still has the frog he thinks is Pete, inside a shoe box with some straw. After they eat lunch under a large tree, Big Dan breaks off a branch and uses it to beat up Delmar and Everett so he can rob them. He thinks they are hiding something valuable inside the shoebox, but when he opens it he only finds the frog. Disappointed and angry, he squashes the frog in his hand then throws it at the tree. Everybody calls it a toad, but what we see in the movie is really a frog - a species of leopard frog. When we see it crawling out from under the shirt, we hear real leopard frog sounds. (I thought this was a miracle since most frog sounds in movies are wrong.) But then, as it hops into the creek, the frog makes the same sound we always hear in movies to represent a frog - the "rib-it" sound of the Pacific Treefrog. (There goes my miracle.) But then we hear another leopard frog sound. So it's two for three, that's better than most movie frogs.