So I read on The PRP that Faith No More’s Roddy Bottum is doing the score for something called FRED, the Movie, starring someone named Fred Figglehorn. Now, unless it’s Pixar, I really don’t much about what’s going on in children’s cinema these days; I assumed that this was the the height of modern kiddie movies. Fred Figglehorn is apparently a YouTube star, because we’ve gotten to a point where there’s such a thing as a YouTube star, but, again, that didn’t mean all that much to me.

But, hey, I love Roddy Bottum! I’m a huge Faith No More fan! And I’ve only heard one Imperial Teen song, but I thought that it was catchy enough. So I decided to do some homework on this Fred Figglehorn fellow.

And, holy shit, is he ever annoying.

That was less than three minutes long. Can you believe that? It felt longer than The Sorrow and the Pity.

Do kids really watch this? Does anyone really watch this? It made me feel like I was having a bad trip or something. This is like the 3OH!3 of children’s programming. I’d ask somebody to explain the appeal to me, but I don’t care; if I saw my kid watching this I’d put the fear of Dino Cazares into them.

Remember Voltron? It was like a robot made from a bunch of smaller but only slightly less-awesome robots? I’m sure it had all the narrative coherence of Helen Keller’s diary, but at least there was, like, some idea behind it – “Oh, we’ll blow shit up and make cool robots and sell toys.” Okay, fair enough. But there’s no idea behind Fred. “I know, I’ll see what I can do to make Axl Rosenberg move that much closer to buying an uzi and just mowing down random crowds of people.”

Which brings me to the point of this post:

WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS, RODDY BOTTUM?!?!

Things were going too well? You were all, “Hey, this Faith No More reunion is going great, and everyone loves me now more than ever. What can I do to fuck it up?” Mike Patton did something awesome with his spare time. You’re doing this. Groovy.

Apparently Bottum only has ten days to do the score, which I assume is nine and three-quarter days more than Fred puts into making these things.

And, oh yeah, Bottum also played on Chuck Mosley’s insanely awful re-recording of “We Care A Lot” last year. So that’s two strikes, Bottum. Get it together, man!

-AR