This soft plastic frog is the successor to the popular Snag Proof Wobbletron Frog
A veritable dream team put together by American Baitworks Co. created the brand-new Snag Proof Zoo Kick, which in time is sure to prove as good as, if not better than, its predecessor from the mid-2010s.
The Mississippi-based company consulted with Bobby Barrack, who built the wildly popular Snag Proof Wobbletron plastic frog in the mid-2010s, got acclaimed decoy artist Andrew Gardner to paint the creation, and enlisted the bass fishing expertise of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Elite Series Pro Justin Hamner, long before he won the 2024 Bassmaster Classic at Oklahoma’s Grand Lake, to help design the Zoo Kick.
The newest entry to Snag Proof’s Zoo Series is scheduled to hit the market in early 2025.
Hamner, who worked with prototypes for the past year, has been waiting for the soft plastic frog to make its debut.
“Man, I love that bait,” Hamner, 33, said. “It’s a no-brainer if you have one frog to pick, a hollow body or a traditional toad frog. You don’t have to choose between the two and use one.”
That’s because the Zoo Kick can be fished several ways, he said, either like a “toad frog” in duckweed or walk-the-dog frog in open water. How much confidence does he have in the Zoo Kick? For sure, he said, he’ll use it on the Bassmaster Elite Series tour in 2025 at the Sabine River in mid-May over in eastern Texas and on the Mississippi River at La Crosse, Wisconsin, in August.
“There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind,” he said. “No doubt I’ll be using it a lot (in those tournaments). It’s so versatile.”
The next iteration
Hamner, who was enjoying the offseason while looking forward to the Elite circuit in 2025, tied a Zoo Kick on Oct. 26 for an American Baitworks Open tournament with his father, Carl Hamner of Tuscaloosa, at Lake Guntersville. Four of the five bass they weighed smashed the Zoo Kick, he said.
The Hamner father-and-son team fished with the old Wobbletron Frogs religiously for years, he said, noting they were given to him by none other than Barrack. It wasn’t too long ago they were scrambling, as many bassers were, to get their hands on the old but reliable plastic frogs.
American Baitworks Co. decided to build another plastic frog like it and add it to the Zoo Series. Hamner, Gardner and others began working on the design “at least a year ago,” Hamner said, adding it was challenging to tweak a few features of the predecessor.
“I know I had my hands on three or four (prototypes),” he said. “I don’t know how many there were before that. It was quite a few. Bobby Barrack is the one who made the original. I’m sure he had a lot to do with it.”
Alterations and improvements
The designers addressed the issues of preventing the weight on the plastic frog from falling off and improving the water evac system, the latter which he believes was the biggest complaint about Wobbletrons. They also beefed up the hook a little bit.
According to Hamner, the utmost attention was given to the placement of the legs that end in a paddle shape.
“The legs. I think that was the hardest part to get right,” Hamner said. “If they were too stiff, they’d be too hard to get right. If they were too soft, they just kind of floated around back there. We were looking for a good type of bubbling action.”
Otherwise, he said about the ½-ounce Zoo Kick, “The body is still the same size, the same feel, but we use a little tougher plastic.”
The paint job is out of this world. He called it crazy in a very good way.
“All of our colors are actually done by Andrew Gardner,” Hamner said.
For more information about the Snag Proof Zoo Kick and other American Baitworks Co. products, go to americanbaitworks.com, email to info@americanbaitworks.com or call 844-466-5738 or 228-967-7470.
