Like 'The Princess and the Frog'? Check out other adaptations of 'The Frog Prince'

Shelley Duvall's Showtime TV series "Faerie Tale Theatre" retold traditional tales, often with famous actors. The first episode is a version of The Brothers Grimm's "The Frog Prince" written, directed and narrated by Eric Idle. Teri Garr stars as a princess who loses her ball down a well and enlists the assistance of a talking frog (Robin Williams) to get it back.

HBO's animated series "Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child" also adapted "The Frog Prince." In its version, the somewhat spoiled Princess Ebony is longing for friends her own age when one shows up in the form of a frog. It features the voices of Sinbad, Danny Glover, Cree Summer, LeVar Burton and narrator Robert Guillaume. The series also did a version of "Rapunzel" which, like "The Princess and the Frog," is set in the Louisiana bayou. It features Tisha Campbell as the long-haired title character and Whoopi Goldberg as an evil hoodoo diva.

Lotte Reiniger (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotte_Reiniger) was a pioneer of early animation, using her signature cutouts and silhouettes to create such classics as "Adventures of Prince Achmed" (1926). Scarecrow has an imported collection of her fairy-tale adaptations, "Lotte Reiniger: The Fairy Tale Films," which includes her telling of "The Frog Prince," along with "Cinderella," "Sleeping Beauty" and other classic stories.

Kermit the Frog stars in and narrates the 1972 Muppet musical "The Frog Prince." A young prince named Sir Robin (human Gordon Thomson) is strolling along one day when he's suddenly attacked by a hungry ogre (the Muppet known as Sweetums, wielding a heavy club). As he's fighting off the furry menace, a witch appears and turns him into a frog (Kermit's nephew Robin). He learns he can return to normal with a little peck from a princess, so he sets out to find one. Things get complicated when he finds a princess who is also cursed and speaks in seeming gibberish. Sir Robin traces the curse back to the same witch and performs some deft deciphering so he and his princess can live happily ever after.

Aileen Quinn (who played Annie in the 1983 film) stars as Princess Zora in a 1988 live-action musical version of "The Frog Prince" by Cannon Movie Tales. Zora makes friends with an upright-walking frog she calls Ribbit, arousing jealousy in her sister Henrietta, played by future Oscar winner Helen Hunt.

"The Princess and the Magic Frog" (1965) was probably made with children as the target audience, but it plays more like something you'd watch at 3 a.m. after a long night of overindulgence. A boy, out for a walk in some seemingly ordinary woods, finds a frog in his pocket. He then gets lost, and while trying to find his way home he gets into all sorts of surreal situations, including an encounter with a leprechaun brandishing wish-granting coins, talking road signs, an evil wizard who uses pies in the face as torture and a genie who has lost his powers. It's on DVD thanks to local film company Something Weird.

If you're just a fan of all things froglike, we recommend the Australian documentary "Cane Toads: An Unnatural History" (1988). Director Mark Lewis examines the problems that ensued when the nonnative species was introduced in Queensland to eat the beetles that were threatening the local sugarcane crop. The toads got rid of the pests but prospered enough to become a pest themselves. The film is engaging enough for adults and has plenty of charm for the kids, especially with the many scenes of toads the size of dinner plates happily leaping around people's backyards.

Contributed by Scarecrow Video, 5030 Roosevelt Way N.E., Seattle; 206-524-8554 or www.scarecrow.com.