Commentary

The Revenge of Fred: Yes, (Lord Help Us) The Movie

I am not sure what to say here except check the sky for locusts and maybe the right-leaning wingnuts are right and Obama is the Anti-Christ. The ends may well be near. Fred -- yes, that Fred Figgelhorn of YouTube fame -- is getting a movie.

Nickelodeon has recruited Lucas Cruikshank, the maker of the high-pitched motor-mouth YouTube rash Fred to make a feature film. You know Fred even if you don't know Fred. He embodies all that is additively irritating about user-generated content. All of the comedy stylings we entertained ourselves with in the bathtub as ten-year-olds is now mass entertainment. In pretty much the same way Lorne Michaels has tried to wrap movies around SNL sketch personalities ("Pat," "McGruber" et. al.) we now have the prospect of Nick plumbing the depths of YouTube fame for the next generation of really bad filmmaking.

Who knows. Maybe it will be infectious kiddie fare. In the September release, Fred seems poised to squeal his way through an adventure into the scary woods ("WOODS!!) in pursuit of his lost love Judy ("JUUUUDY!"). Judy will be the predictably blonde bombshell played by a British pop star named (I kid you not) Pixie Lott. The radically less blonde neighbor Bertha is actually the only person who can tolerate Fred. There will be the nemesis, Judy's boyfriend and overall jerk. And the staple of all things Nick -- the oddly absent parents. Fred's dad pops in as a vision from time to time and his mother is a lazy wreck. I have to say as the parent of a daughter who grew up on Nick, I was always mildly offended at just how clueless and irrelevant parents were in most of the live-action series. For some reason they actually had a harmless presence in the animated series like Rugrats and Jimmy Neutron, but I was always asking my daughter "where are their parents" in the shows. "I dunno," she always replied. "Around, I guess."

From the look of the message boards at the Nick sites, Fred has a following. They are calling him a "genius" on the forums. I don't know if it is genius but there is a real talent in this kid. He has smart mannerisms and slowly but surely has built a fiction around himself and his family. There is a kind of deep cynicism mixed in with the buoyancy. Irritating as the video diaries are, the persona has some of the dweeby panache of Martin Short's great Second city TV character Ed Grimley who was also a character overflowing with unselfconscious childish enthusiasm. I believe at one point Grimley was turned into a Saturday morning cartoon, effectively killing any future for the character. Let this be a lesson.

Nick might take note. The real genius of SCTV, which Lorne Michaels never had, was in knowing when a comic idea had worn out its welcome. When SCTV writers knew they had a funny idea that couldn't carry a full skit they made it into a fake TV commercial for a show they never actually would make. Michaels' extrapolations of minor SNL ideas into movies usually take modestly funny notions and demonstrates just how uninspired they are by trying to stretch them into movies. Let's hope the same doesn't happen to the talents on YouTube that work best in small windows and in short, short doses. Sometimes less is more.

2 comments about "The Revenge of Fred: Yes, (Lord Help Us) The Movie".
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  1. Karen Bunn, August 6, 2010 at 2:04 p.m.

    I'm sorry, but it looks cute. I can see the Nick crowd giving this one a lot of attention.

  2. Mark Burrell from Tongal, August 6, 2010 at 2:28 p.m.

    Banging on Nickelodeon for a desperate YouTube grab is one thing but banging one of the 5 most influential people in comedy history, Lorne Michaels, is another. In terms of movies, some may very well be failures but BLUES BROTHERS and WAYNE'S WORLD are two of the best comedies ever made; which gives him a better bating average than 99% of other producers and studios in the last 30 years. You throw in THREE AMIGOS, 30 ROCK and then look at all the other offshoots ranging from GHOSTBUSTERS to BILLY MADISON to ANCHORMAN and I'd tell you that outside of Pixar, Lorne Michaels is the best bet of all time.

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