You’ve delighted in his high energy and even higher pitched voice on YouTube. Are you ready to withstand a full length feature featuring Fred Figglehorn?
“Fred: The Movie” comes to Nickelodeon Sept. 17, the fruit of Lucas Cruikshank, the 16 year old who started the character in his home in Lincoln, Neb., and Brian Robbins, the creator of “All That.”
To present 90 minutes of the character instead of three or so meant having to tone the character – based on a high energy six year old. His voice is no longer sped up to the velocity of a chipmunk or enhanced by a helium balloon.
“The whole movie’s not sped up because obviously that would be really annoying for a few hours,” Cruikshank says. “But, yeah, it’s a little bit toned down. Because in the videos Fred’s video blogging, so he’s really excited or he’s really mad or he has an intense emotion because he’s video blogging. But the movie shows him when he’s not video blogging, so he’s not as crazy.”
It put him in the realm of real actors, such as Jennette McCurdy, the sidekick on “iCarly” who is his costar on “Fred: The Movie.” She was impressed with the newcomer’s abilities.
“I was really taken with Lucas’s improv skills. He was so good,” McCurdy says. “Our director was great and really wanted us to improvise a lot and kind of test that side of acting. And he would just come up with things off the cuff that, I mean, people who have done improv for years can’t think of. He’s just so quick and awesome. So it was a blast working with him.”
A Hollywood movie is a long step from Fred’s modest beginning.
“When I first started making videos on YouTube, YouTube had just been created,” Cruikshank says. “There never had been a story about someone getting discovered or having anything more happen than getting a few views, and that’s all I expected, was to maybe make, like, 10 people laugh or 15 or just my friends. I was always looking to find ways to make your music legal for YouTube.
“I’ve been making videos even before YouTube with my mom’s camera or my friend’s mom’s camera, and it was before even, like, videos online,” he says. ”I was just making, like, random videos, like random characters and weird storylines and stuff. And then, for my 13th birthday I got a digital video camera, and I started putting it online and messing around with the editing. And then someone told me about YouTube, and I checked it out and I just put videos on there just for the heck of it. I wasn’t expecting anything to happen.”
Says Cruikshank, “I never understood that the whole world could see it, so it’s definitely been a surprise.”
His various Fred videos have been viewed 5 million times on YouTube.
“I started posting when I was 12, which isn’t even old enough to have a YouTube account,” he says.
Now, “Fred: The Movie,” which might be the first of a series of films like “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.” It debuts on Nickelodeon Sept. 17.