Fred Jones (Scooby-Doo)
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- For other uses, see Fred Jones (disambiguation).
Frederick Herman Jones, known to his friends by the nickname "Freddie", is a fictional character in the long running American television animated series Scooby-Doo, about a quartet of teenage mystery solvers and their Great Dane cohort, Scooby-Doo.
The leader of the group, and (usually) the driver of the gang's van, the Mystery Machine, Fred is a blonde, ascot-wearing, statuesque and brave youth; everything that the group's other male human member, Shaggy, isn't. In later spinoffs, Fred is also shown as having a great interest in various types of sports.
Fred would often be shown constructing various Rube Goldberg traps for villains, which Scooby-Doo and/or Shaggy would often set off by mistake, only for the villain to wind up captured by the trap anyway. During the first season of Scooby Doo, Where Are You?, Fred would sometimes refer to his cohort Daphne Blake as "Danger-Prone Daphne" due to her penchant for getting into trouble.
Fred leads the group in solving mysteries and often orders the gang to split up to search for clues. Fred usually takes the female members of the gang, Daphne and Velma, with him while Shaggy and Scooby go off by themselves although he would sometimes send Velma along with Shaggy and Scooby; Fred's main catchphrase is related to this divide-and-conquer clue search method: "let's split up, gang..."
Some fans have posited that Fred and Daphne share an attraction to each other, but this has yet to be truly declared as such in the series itself (though Cartoon Network, in its various promotional bumpers, has had fun with this notion).
In the 1990s direct-to-video movies and in the 2000s series What's New, Scooby Doo?, Fred's outfit was given an update, with the removal of his ascot the most noticeable change. He also is shown as slightly less intelligent, and more clueless to his surroundings. The removal of the ascot was poked fun at during one of the first promotional advertisements for What's New, Scooby Doo?, when the ascot is found on the ground, puzzling everyone but Fred, who seems to be uncomfortable around the discovery.
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[edit] Childhood
Fred's childhood started in the cartoon "A Pup Named Scooby-Doo.'" Fred had a very odd childhood, noteworthy as being slightly hyperactive, danger-prone (of which now he calls Daphne), and superstitious. He was frequently picked on by Red Herring, the neighborhood bully. He subscribed to a magazine, the National Exaggerator, that "reported" real monsters (his favorites being the mole people and the mud monsters). This is later hinted at in What's New, Scooby Doo? shown from his eccentric actions. Fred also almost always gets something wrong at the end of A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, as he always (or almost always) accuses Red Herring as being the villain; this is almost a similarity in the movie Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed when he hesitated and tried to accuse the camera man as being another villain. It is shown that Fred has worn his ascot since childhood.
[edit] Voices
Frank Welker (1969-present)
Carl Stevens (1988-1991)
[edit] Relatives
Relatives of Fred's shown or mentioned during the series include ([1]):
- Skip and Peggy Jones: Fred's parents.
- Eddie Jones: Fred's uncle. The publisher of the tabloid newspaper The National Exaggerator.
- The Count von Jones: Fred's uncle. Lives in a castle near a factory that makes specialized coffins, and runs a museum.
- An uncle in the U.S. Air Force and works for a space agency.
- An uncle who is first cymbalist in the U.S. Marine Corps band.
[edit] Trivia
- In the original cartoon series and all of its spinoffs (save for A Pup Named Scooby-Doo), Fred is voiced by Frank Welker; the junior high version of Fred featured in A Pup Named Scooby-Doo is voiced by Carl Stevens. Frank Welker instead voiced Fred's uncle, Eddie in A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. In Warner Bros.' two live-action Scooby-Doo feature films and the Robot Chicken sketch (which they encounter Jason Voorhees), he is played by Freddie Prinze Jr..
- The second-season episode of The Venture Bros. entitled ¡Viva los Muertos! features the entire Scooby-Doo cast re-imagined as famous serial killers and radicals. Fred's analogue, "Ted", is charismatic and abusive, à la Ted Bundy, and bullies his companions into driving around in a van and solving nonexistent mysteries. He is also a sadist, as evidenced by his line, "Patty (Daphne), being out of your box isn't a right. It's a privilege. Baby, you don't want to go back in your box, do you?"
