If the computer-animated Veggie Tales could serve up a dish of anthropomorphic talking vegetables, it was only fair that anthropomorphic talking fruit be given their own TV cartoon series. The setting of the weekly, half-hour Coconut Fred's Fruit Salad Island was a tiny tropical isle populated by humanized bananas, melons, berries, and citrus fruit. Coconut Fred (a coconut--what else?) was the wackiest resident of Fruit Salad Island, whose zany schemes and Herculean efforts to solve life's problems invariably brought trouble to his neighbors. Even so, Fred was a cockeyed coconut optimist, and never tired of hatching new ideas, each one "nuttier" than the last. There are those who intimated that this series, which featured two short adventures per episode, was an attempt to copy the popular cable effort SpongeBob SquarePants, but audiences were too busy laughing to worry about the comparision. Produced by Warner Bros. Animation, Coconut Fred's Fruit Salad Island was first telecast on the WB network's Saturday-AM schedule on September 17, 2005.
by Hal Erickson
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