Mary and Fred

Mary and Fred in their disguises

Mary and Fred are two exceedingly unintelligent aliens of an unknown species who make a living out of capturing and collecting alien specimens from various planets. It is important to note that "Mary" and "Fred" are not their real names; rather, they were the names they had written on the name tags of their "human" disguises.

Both aliens speak with Cockney British accents. Mary (Green) speaks with a higher-pitched voice and a slight stereotypical 'hillbilly' accent, and constantly refers to Fred (Blue) as 'Pa'. Fred (Blue) has slightly a deeper-sounding, rather gruff voice.

Their species are brownish-green in color, and have solid-colored eyes, similar to an Irken's. They are very tall, and their shoulders go up to their heads.

Mary and Fred travel around in a huge cloaking device-equipped spaceship, abducting both sentient and non-sentient creatures and performing "experiments" on them. However, all of their specimens have easily escaped, save one, who has been "fused" (duct taped) to various items by Mary and Fred and lacks the limbs necessary to leave his containment tube.

On their visit to Earth, they encountered Zim, and claimed to be his new neighbours while their spaceship knocked out Zim's communication field, interrupting his conversation with the Tallest. However, Zim quickly saw through their pitiful disguises and called them out as aliens; Fred quickly resorted to "Plan two", which was to stuff Zim and GIR in a sack, and take them up. Once aboard their spaceship, the aliens stated their intention to perform a "fusion" experiment on Zim, which involved fusing him "to another human being”. The exasperated Irken attempted to make them understand that he wasn't human (going so far as to remove his and GIR's disguises), but even obvious facts weren't strong enough to break through their thick skulls.

Zim talking to "Mary."

Eventually, the two abductors decided to carry out the experiment anyway, which turned put to be far more pathetic than it sounded: in actuality, the "human" they had was really a gopher, and all they did was duct-tape it to Zim's head.

Eventually, Zim managed to distract his abductors by directing their attention toward the ceiling, and easily managed to leave the ship with GIR in one of the escape pods. Throughout the chase, Mary and Fred's efforts to recover their specimens can only be described as minimal; even when they were standing outside the open hatch to Zim and GIR's pod, they merely pawed at them halfheartedly.

As alien abductors, Mary and Fred are ludicrously inept, ignorant and unintelligent; they are very easily fooled, yet place complete faith in their own, horribly incorrect misconceptions. Moreover, they often lament the fact that all of their specimens escape, yet they do absolutely nothing to fix the facts that their containment tubes can be easily opened and exited from the inside, and their ship has absolutely nothing in the way of security.

"Fred" talking to Zim.

Mary and Fred seem to have a limited understanding, if any at all, of humans, Earth, and the universe in general. They have not heard of the Irken Empire, as they "don't get that TV no more". Mary seems to have an obsession with fusing things to Fred's juice, as Fred stated: "Look, I'm the captain, and I'm sick of you always fusing things to my juice!".

They made their only appearance on the show in "Abducted". At the end of the episode, they are seen abducting Dib, thinking that he is a specimen of a weasel.

The duo would eventually return in the comics in the second story in Quarterly 3, in which Zim wakes up in an old fashioned bedroom, and is confronted by two beings disguised poorly as "the ghosts of Fistmas", whom he quickly realizes are the same abductors he met once before. They reveal that they've trapped him in a simulation of a holiday they call "Fistmas", which they intend to use to conquer Earth, after using Zim to test the simulation and figure out just what Fistmas is.

The "Ghosts of Fistmas"

Zim calls them out on misunderstanding Christmas, and how he's already tried this plot, but finds out that he can't leave until he's completed the simulation, so he reluctantly goes along with it. He observes a poorly designed simulated version of himself choosing work over love, a family composed of GIR, Dib, and others denouncing him for having no Fistmas spirit, and his own abandoned grave. However, Zim refuses to learn any lesson, causing the simulation to crash. He then demands to be returned home, and while Mary and Fred tell him that they can't because they're in space, Zim knows they're still floating by his house in their terribly disguised ship.

Their cameo in the final issue

The pair made their second appearance in the comic in the final issue as part of the montage of beings across the universe being caught in the time loop, with Green looking on as the loop got bigger but most likely not understanding what was going on.

Quotes

• ”Heuuuehuahuauauhuueaoeueyy, YEAH! The dog! Explain it!”
• ”Howdy, Squishy! We would like to vomit language in the young man that lives in this shelter unit!”
• ”Oh! Another escape, is it me? Is it me HUH?!”
• ”Aw the juice! JUICE!”
• ”Aw, now the other one's getting away!”
• ”Oh, look at him go.”

Facts of Doom

• They were originally voiced by Eric Trueheart and Paul Greenberg as placeholders. However, takes were done of Brian George and Jim Wise, who were planned to be the actual voices of the two aliens; due to an audio mix-up, their voices weren't included, but Wise and George are still credited as the voice actors in the episode.
• According to Jhonen Vasquez and Steve Ressel in their respective commentaries, the crew originally sought to get Monty Python members John Cleese and Eric Idle to do the voices of the Abductors, when Cleese declined, it was then sought to get Terry Jones. In the end, none of them agreed to contribute.
• As noted above, their real names are unknown. Because of this, some fans have taken to calling them "Blue" and "Green", in reference to their respective eye colors.
• Blue told Zim that he and Green have "spent hundreds of Earth years harvesting the galaxy". This implies their species has longevity, although it's equally plausible that due to their incredible stupidity, these aliens can't tell time, let alone know for sure how many days are in an Earth year.
• Because of their incredible stupidity, Blue and Green can't tell different species apart even when it's painfully obvious. Over the course of their one episode, they confuse an Irken for a human, a robot for a dog, a gopher for a human, and a human for a weasel.
• Green claims to "read a lot", though his vocabulary seems to suggest otherwise.
• They both appeared in Jhonen Vasquez's earlier work, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, and mainly Squee! and made their debut in the Invader Zim comics in the Third Quarterly Issue, this time in color.
• In the series, Blue and Green could walk while in both Squee! and JTHM they used floating chairs to move around as they had lost their legs. This seems to imply that the events of "Abducted" happened before the comics, assuming they share the same continuity.
• Amazingly, when Zim re-encounters Blue and Green in Quarterly 3, he actually remembers them despite his tendency to forget certain people or events.
• Oddly enough in "Abducted" the aliens seemed more interested in capturing different species for their "collection" but in Quarterly 3 they are now trying to take over the Earth, which unsurprisingly they attempt to do so even worse than Zim has tried to in the past.
• Overall, during the duration of the series and the comics, Blue and Green made only three appearances, once in the series and twice in the comics and the last time was simply a cameo.
• They could be considered the least threatening antagonists on the show, and in fact Zim doesn't seem to view them as enemies, more like mere annoyances.