it’s the most wonderful time of the year, and youtubers are ramping up their production quality for their final video of the year. everything for the past 12 months has led up to this point, and audiences have their expectations increased. whether or not this season finale is tied to any holiday celebration, it is sure to be a riot.

the caddicarus show has had its fair share of christmas specials. its 2020 reboot to this day still hasn’t had anything close to a halloween special - if you read my entry about the month of terraaarrr then you’d know that halloween used to mean serious business on this channel. but the reboot has managed to get 2 christmas specials so far, with the 3rd just around the corner in the form of a 1 million subscriber special we’ve been waiting a hot minute for.

so how about we discuss these christmas specials? it’s the perfect time of year, and i have plenty of nostalgic memories with these videos.

2012-2015 specials (old kingdom/first intermediate period)

the first caddicarus christmas special was santa claus saves the earth. this episode is still such a classic all these years later. it’s got one of those classic 2010’s game reviewer special story arcs where the evil spirit of telegames “possesses” caddy’s PS1 and caddy is forced to shoot it. he then lays it to rest at the playground behind his house while lip-syncing to a muppets christmas carol song. it’s also where the lesbians clip is from.

when i came along in 2014, this video was blocked here in the US for featuring most of that muppets song. however, 12-year-old me was able to find it on the hidden block website. i watched it on the family computer in the dead of night with the volume low. a formative experience.

next year, caddy reviewed the grinch PS1 entirely in rhyme. yes, seriously.

in 2014, he counted down his top 10 snow levels in video games. i have a warm and fuzzy memory of watching this with my best friend on her TV in her room while we ate pizza. this was back during the times of frozen fever and i was vehemently on the side of frozen hatred - so that “do you want to build a snowman?” reference pissed me the hell off. XD

then in 2015, he reviewed legoland, which was the first non-explicitly-christmasy subject for a caddicarus christmas video - never again would he take a look at a (secular) christmas-themed game for a christmas video lmao. i remember making my first tumblr account on the day this video came out.

 

2016-2018 specials (middle kingdom/second intermediate period)

in early november of 2016, caddy uploaded this update video. in it, he announced that he’d be taking a 1-month break from the channel - the longest break the channel had ever been on at that point. this was because he was moving, and because he was working on a very elaborate christmas special. this christmas special wasn’t a part of any show - in fact, it was its own thing.

the cadvent calendar was a series of videos in which caddy counted down his top 25 video games of all time. every single day in december through the 25th, we got a new short video for each game. this was the craziest thing at the time…we were already getting 3 videos a week, but now we were getting videos every day?

i don’t really have anything much to say about the videos themselves, it was pretty much just a normal top list but without any filmed segments or cutaway gags - maybe that’s why they weren’t as memorable, imo. but of course, this was his way of still providing us with a neat Christmas special while he was making a pretty big move!

jan animations created the intro sequence. i remember watching jan create the intro on his streams - he’d play so much banger music and at one point he actually played some caddicarus videos and we watched them on stream XD i also made a hip hop remix of the theme song - it sounds very wonky because i created the thing in audacity. 💀

december 2017 was the first and only december in which every caddicarus episode was christmas-themed. well, okay, they were very LOOSELY christmas-themed…

caddy donned a christmas sweater in every video (except for the proper christmas special, where he wore a mario onesie). there was the episode on the die hard trilogy(i haven’t seen die hard but i know it’s considered a christmas film for some reason), there was the silent hill episode (silent hill has snow so therefore = christmas), the mega man 8 collab with gillythekid had a bit where gilly sent him a present that just so happened to be the topic of the video, and the peppa pig game episode had a similar setup. they’re also all officially considered christmas videos because they’re in the “a crazy caddy christmas” playlist.

these 4 episodes actually still hold up pretty well today for being from what i used to consider the worst season of the original series. i actually hated the mega man 8 episode when it dropped…i guess i thought it wasn’t funny and/or that caddy and gilly didn’t work as well together. upon rewatch, it wasn’t as bad as i remember. yeah some jokes fell flat but overall it’s a solid episode. it’s nowhere near as mid as the entirety of the season that came after this one.

before i rewatched the die hard episode, i’d completely forgotten about the “yippie ki yay muddy phillip” bit and then promptly laughed my ass off.

the proper christmas special on the peppa pig game dropped on christmas eve, and that whole day is a warm and fuzzy memory. i went to the christmas eve service at church with my family, then we got taco bell and went home and watched the santa clause, and right after that i got the notification for the new caddicarus episode. that night i ended up getting the galaxy-themed new nintendo 3DS XL to replace my previous 3DS that broke.

in 2018, caddy produced his sequel to the cadvent calendar - the BADvent calendar! this was originally supposed to air in 2017, but too many things got in the way. it worked the exact same way as the cadvent calendar did, except it was now the worst games caddy ever played.

funnily enough - i haven’t watched this special in full until very recently. when this was released, i was kinda losing interest in caddicarus, and just a day after this special started, jontron returned to youtube after a year. needless to say, my mind was set on jontron for the remainder of the month, and for the next several months as well. that didn’t help with my waning special interest.

but yeah, nothing much to say about this one.

 

2019 is currently the only year we’ve gone without a caddicarus christmas special. we don’t know yet if the spyro video will have slight christmas themes or references in it, since that’s pretty much the only requirement for a mid-late december caddicarus episode to be billed as a christmas special.

2019 actually was going to have a christmas special, but it was abruptly canceled due to reasons i’ll get into in the entry about the second intermediate period. i keep teasing this entry lmao…it’ll be a lengthy one.

 

2020-present specials (new kingdom)

the caddicarus show’s reboot has had 2 christmas specials so far - one about the PS5 release and one on jesus games. the jesus games video in particular had one of the first explicitly christmasy subjects we’ve seen in a hot minute - albiet not secular.

as usual for the 2020-present videos, they’re bangers. obviously, i was absent for these, but mannnnn after watching these, i know that i missed out.

 

over the years, this channel has stayed consistent when it came to christmas specials. a lot of happy memories were made with these videos!!

in the next entry, we’re going to be looking at a certain side-show that made its debut in december of 2015…and how it affected the channel and its fanbase.