Origins
The series' official web site describes the phonetic spelling for Fez's name (as opposed to "FES") as "poetic license". Fez's friends know his real name but consider it unpronounceable. Red usually calls him "the foreign kid," or by a random foreign name (e.g. Hadji, Anwar, Sabu, Ali Baba, Pelé, Ahmad, Stalin, Tutankhamon, etc.), which Fez doesn't mind, except for being called Tarzan because Tarzan is a white man. Eric's grandmother calls him "Desi."
A flashback episode shows when Fez first meets the others. They rescue him from a janitor's closet where several bullies had hung him on a coat hook. The bullies had asked him if he wanted to hang out; he tells the gang he "shouldn't have said yes." Moments later he states his real name, which is drowned out by a long, ringing school bell (what Valderrama was actually saying was the first names of the main actors who appear in the show). The only known fact about his name is, as he states in the episode "Killer Queen", the first five K's of his last name are silent.
Valderrama has stated that he fabricated the accent he used on the show, so that no one could try to identify which country his character is from, a mystery that show creators deliberately kept a secret.
Read more about this topic: Fez (That '70s Show)
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)