Where Are They Now? Fred

I’ve been apart of Branded for almost two months now and honestly it has been amazing. Everyone seems pretty cool, CEO Joe just lets us all go and be creative with no limits. It is exactly what I was hoping it would be when I joined. With all of that being said I really want to start doing more original content like when I interviewed the guy who vaped that girls bath water.

Some of you might not know but I was in Barstool Idol with Boats and Ali, unlike them I didn’t make it past the audition stage, one of my pitches to Barstool when I applied was this concept for “Where Are They Now?” where I look into internet stars from yesteryear and find out what they’re up to.

Probably didn’t need any of the first two paragraphs but its already written out so there is no going back now, okay I’ll stop rambling now.

Every single person who is 20+ years old remembers Fred. Fred was the annoying guy from YouTube with the high pitch voice when we were in middle school, one of the original YouTube stars. The Fred channel was made in April 2008 and in only a year became the first YouTube channel with over a million subscribers, if you’re a little younger or somehow missed the Fred craze I cannot stress enough how big this dude was. Before I started writing this and doing some research on him I had no idea how quickly he blew up. Fred went from some guy doing voices on this newish video website to making movies with John Cena for Nickelodeon in TWO YEARS.

I feel like in the time we’re in now with how YouTube works and social media that might not seem as impressive as it is when we have people like Bagel Guy who are an asshole for two minutes and is now a celebrity. What Fred did is one of the more impressive things done by a YouTuber.

This is supposed to be about where Fred is now but I feel like I would be doing a disservice to all of you if I didn’t at least hit you with some stats. At the time I’m writing this the Fred channel has almost 3 million subs and nearly 1.3 BILLION (yes, with a B) views. In 5 years, all while continuing his YouTube videos, Fred was in 3 movies about himself, 7 TV shows (appearances on iCarly, Hannah Montana, Big Time Rush and a 22 episode show about Fred), he won Web Star of the year at the 2009 Teen Choice Awards and he released two albums including a fucking Christmas album.

I can’t stress how big time this fucking guy was.

Okay, now that I am done gassing this dude up lets talk about the man the myth the legend, Lucas Cruikshank. Lucas is the mad man who created Fred and now runs his new YouTube channel, Lucas, with a respectable 3 million subs. Lucas made the last real Fred video 5 years ago and after taking some time off in 2015 he introduced a 7 episode series where (spoiler alert) “new Fred”, a little Korean boy, stole the channel and Lucas had to go save the real Fred and the channel from the Yuksung company in Korea. After that the Fred character seemingly dies and is replaced by various other video series including one where Jake Paul asks children if they want to throw a pie in their parents face.

Now on the Lucas channel it looks like he is still pretty active on it and uploads various styles of videos from reacting to when Zac Efron was on Room Raiders, side note what a fucking show that was, to going thrift shopping with his brother. A lot has changed over the years.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Lucas Cruikshank (@lucascruikshank)

Long Live Fred.

I have a few ideas of who to do one of these on next but if you have any suggestions send them to me on twitter @EJS_4.