Coconut Fred's Fruit Salad Island (partially found pitch pilot of Kids' WB! animated comedy series; early-mid 2000s)

The pilot's logo.

Status: Partially Found

Coconut Fred's Fruit Salad Island is an animated comedy series that ran on Kids’ WB! from 2005 to 2006. The series takes place on an island inhabited by fruit where various wacky situations ensue, the main characters being Fred a happy-go-lucky coconut, Slip and Slide 2 twin banana brothers, Bingo a timid cherry, Mr. Mel Greenrind a watermelon who tries to establish order on the island and Bunga Berry a feral strawberry who's also mute. The series was criticized due to its obnoxious over-the-top humor and being too similar to Nickelodeon's SpongeBob SquarePants.

History

Sometime in 2002, Coconut Fred's Fruit Salad Island was originally intended to be pitched to The Disney Channel, until a meeting with Warner Animation's Senior Vice President of Development, Christopher Keenan saw Coconut Fred after Oriti attempted to pitch another project. Keenan fell in love with Coconut Fred and decided to buy the project.^[1]

On November 12th 2002, a pilot was made to pitch the show to the network.^[2] The pilot looks to be an early, and seemingly extended version of the episode "Master of Disaster" with the characters having different designs compared to the final show, with the most notable changes being Fred's missing hair strand and the character designs are more rounded. A main character in the full series, Bunga Berry is absent in the pilot and in Master of Disaster, presumably meaning Bunga was a late addition to the cast.

Availability

After the pilot was pitched to Kids' WB! and was greenlit into a full series, The pilot was used in "Six Flags: Kids' WB Crash the Backlot!", where you can voice over the characters in the pilot inside of a booth. After Crash the Backlot, the pilot hasn't been seen since, and all that's left of the pilot is a promotional image featuring prototype designs for the main cast, an unaired promo including most footage from the pilot promoting the full series and pictures of the outside of the recording booth including images of the pilot.

On June 2020, Twitter user NegaPosi rediscovered clips of the pilot from 2 YTP videos from YouTuber 1downpoison, "Butchy is Sexually Frustrated" and "Grounder lost his penis" and uploaded the footage onto her YouTube channel.^[3] Although when contacting 1downpoison they stated they no longer had footage from the pilot.^[4] Later it would be discovered the pilot footage used in the video originated from the upfront promo, which was previously available online somewhere before being found in 2022.

On July 29th, 2022, a Google Document Q&A with Matt Danner, who was the director of the show was released. The Q&A includes some information from the pilot. When user Thenamebeing asked if he could recall any voice actors from the Coconut Fred & Johnny Test pilots, he replied with "Rob was always Fred. Charlie Adler was Greenrind. Harland Williams was Slip and Slide. On Johnny I only remember Darren Norris doing a few voices." And when asked by user MemphisLonghornOdyssey if he still has the pilot for Coconut Fred and Johnny Test, Matt replies with "I might have them somewhere. I promise I'll look, but I can't promise they still exist.".

On September 26th, 2022, GoldenFiddlement uploaded a promo containing footage of the pilot to her YouTube channel. More footage has yet to surface since that date.