Fred Figglehorn

Fred Figglehorn (stylized on webpage and on T-shirts as FЯED) is a fictional character created and portrayed by American actor Lucas Cruikshank. Fred is a six-year-old boy with a high-pitched voice, and has a dysfunctional home life and "anger management issues". Cruikshank, a teenager from Columbus, Nebraska created the Fred video series for his channel on the video-sharing website YouTube, to center on the Fred character. Although Cruikshank voices Fred, the audio is digitally altered to sound higher-pitched than Cruikshank's true voice.

History

Cruikshank introduced the Fred character in a video on JKL Productions, a channel he started on YouTube in with his cousins, Jon and Katie Smet. He and his cousins set up the JKL Productions channel on June 11, 2006, and Cruikshank uploaded several videos testing out different characters. His first Fred video was uploaded on October 30, 2006, and when this character started to become popular, Cruikshank made more videos featuring Fred. On April 30, 2008, these videos were removed from JKL Productions, and added to the Fred channel. On May 1 the first official video of the series, titled "Fred on May Day" was released, explaining that Cruikshank asked YouTube for the Fred channel. Someone else previously owned the channel, which was later turned into one of Fred's enemies in the Fred series. By April 2009, the channel had over one million subscribers, making it the first YouTube channel to do so, and the most subscribed channel at the time. However, in August 2009, YouTube celebrities Ryan Higa's and Sean Fujiyoshi's channel, Nigahiga, overtook Fred as the most subscribed channel. It was the third to reach 2 million, in September 2010, shortly after falling to third. As of February 2016, the videos have received over 1.1 billion views, and over 2.4 million are subscribed to the channel.