Hoppin’ to Netflix
Calaveras County Fair and Jumping Frog Jubilee featured in new docuseries
The Calaveras County Fair and Jumping Frog Jubilee was canceled this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but the time-honored tradition that dates back to the 1860s and some of the people who make it happen in the 21st century are now streaming on Netflix.
“You can train anywhere you like,” a narrator intones at the opening of the 30-minute “Frog Jumping” episode, which premiered and began streaming Tuesday as part of the Netflix original series “We Are the Champions.”
“But if you want the fame and glory that comes with being the frog jumping champion of the world,” the narrator says, “it’s right here baby, it’s right froggin here. Angels Camp, California, AKA Frogtown USA. This is the oldest and biggest frog jump in the world.”
Brian Golden Davis, executive producer for “We Are the Champions” said when he was first creating the series one the main ideas was “to find communities that are super passionate about something that might come across as a little odd to the rest of the world.”
What attracted Davis to the frog jumping in Calaveras County was it was something that seemed a little odd to an outsider, but “when you dug a little deeper you found a lot of families who were super passionate about it and it’s a big part of their lives.”
Davis said he came across a photo of Joe Kitchell, an Angels Camp resident with the Calaveras Frog Jockeys who has been competing in the Jumping Frog Jubilee for decades. He had “a big mustache, blowing on this frog to get it to jump as far as possible, and I knew from that photo it was something we had to tell the story behind it.”
Davis and his production were in the Angels Camp area for four or five days in May 2019. They stayed at local hotels in the city, and he said people with the Calaveras County Fair and Jumping Frog Jubilee were very open and welcoming.
“What kind of blew everybody away was the Hop of Fame, the fact that the main street is literally paved with plaques for the frog jump champions of each year,” he said. “It shows how big the sport, the event, is to the community and its history.”
Davis and his crew were also impressed with how central the fair, livestock auction and frog jump are for so many people in the community. They could tell how big of a deal it is each year for people living in Calaveras County and those who come to visit
each year for the event.
The history behind the event, with Mark Twain and Angels Camp, is what makes the town and the frog jump so unique, Davis said.
“Looking at the history, the only time it was canceled was in 1933,” he said. “Until this year with the pandemic. So I’m happy we were able to do a show about the previous year’s competition and have it come out now, in a year when it didn’t happen, and get it back in the limelight.”
Several families who are featured in the new Netflix episode have been competing at the fair and jubilee for generations, going back to their grandparents and great-grandparents, said Sandie Lema, a spokesperson for the event.
Logan and Madison Busch, 14-year-old twins from San Jose won first place and second place in May 2019, when their frogs jumped 18 feet, 6 inches and 18 feet, 4 and threequarter inches, respectively, Lema said. The Busch twins have a grandfather who’s been on a San Jose area team that includes the late Lee Giudici, whose frog Rosie the Ribiter set the as-yet unequaled frog jump world record of 21 feet, five and three-quarter inches in 1986.
The first known organized Calaveras County frog jump community event was staged in 1928, to help locals promote and celebrate the paving of Main Street in Angels Camp, Lema said. Their inspiration came from decades before, when Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a traveling miner and journalist who called himself Mark Twain, came to Jackass Hill in Tuolumne County in 1864.
Historians say Twain visited the Angels Hotel saloon in Angels Camp and heard a story about a jumping frog. Twain went back to his cabin at Jackass Hill and wrote “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which became his first famous published work, in November 1865 in The Saturday Press, a literary weekly in New York City.
Everyone knew of Mark Twain the writer by the 1920s. The annual Calaveras County Frog Jump became popular as the event grew in size and merged with the Calaveras County Fair in 1937.
Laurie Giannini, marketing director and chief executive for the Calaveras County Fairgrounds, has been with the fairgrounds since 1991 and estimates she’s seen 28 frog jumps over the years.
The idea of getting national attention is not new to Giannini and other organizers of the event. Giannini said it’s an economic engine for Calaveras County, with economic impact estimated at about $5.2 million in 2015.
“We really work hard,” she said. “We’’ve had other shows contact us and reality shows. We’re quirky and we’re fun but we won’t be mocked, because the economic impact and tradition and history is too important for us to end up on a reality show that doesn’t represent our event or community accurately.”
Davis said he and his production team were smitten with Angels Camp and Frogtown once they got in touch with the people and their frogs.
“Frog jumping can come across as a strange thing, but when you actually jump a frog it is electrifying,” he said. “Everyone on the film crew jumped frogs and everyone was amazed at how addictive it is. You might feel a little silly picking up a frog and putting it on a little green pad. But you want it to jump as far as possible and you will try anything. It’s like riding a horse. You want to ride fast. If you’re going to jump a frog, you want it to jump as far as it can.”