august 22nd, 2022 was a special, monumental day in caddicarus history. a new national holiday. it was the day the channel finally hit one million subscribers - a day that many older fans had concluded at one point would never come.

four months later on december 23rd, the spyro video was released. not counting the season compilations, it was the longest video ever released on the caddicarus channel, clocking out at 2 hours and 24 minutes. and yet, despite its length, many lumpies and germs of all eras sat down for the entire runtime. it was a hit, and it now currently sits at 2.1 million views after a month - something that would’ve been unimaginable four years ago.

it may have taken a decade for the channel to reach a million, but as many fans have commented, this special wouldn’t have been this spectacular had he reached this milestone in the late 2010’s. now that caddy has perfected his craft, the special was as perfect as it could be, and many folks flocked over to celebrate. and some new fans were created as well!

so how arduous was this climb? what challenges led to this achievement taking so long? caddy obviously worked very hard for this milestone, and the work paid off in the quality and recognition department. but of course, there were many obstacles on the way.

in this entry, we’ll be looking back at every subscriber special, and we’ll sprinkle in some context as to what was going on with the channel when those specials dropped.

10,000 subscribers! (january 8th 2013)

the very first subscriber special on the caddicarus channel was a 5-minute sketch, and in that sketch was a song! the song was a parody of super sonic racing from sonic R, and it was the first time we had seen caddy showing off his musical talent…well, at least in this era of the channel. of course he had shown it off in the 2011-12 skits but i assume those had been deleted at this point. i obviously wasn’t around yet so i can only assume.

but this was a certified hood classic, so classic that jim decided to keep this up after the october 2021 purge. in fact, just a few months ago, he pinned this comment…

this video is a wondrous time capsule of caddicarus history! it deserves to be seen and remembered! such humble times these were.

 

the worst thing ever (50,000 subscriber special, may 5th 2013)

and here was the first proper subscriber special, as in a fully-fledged caddicarus episode. this was actually one of those generation-defining episodes - this was the first episode for a lot of 2013 folks. it was one of the highest viewed episodes on the channel, and i think it was the highest viewed video on the channel before dalmatians 3 and peppa pig.

and this episode deserved these figures. this and its companion episode about the grinch DVD menu were my favorites of season 2, and they’re two of the episodes i rewatched the most back in my earlier days as a caddicarus fan. they actually still hold up pretty well today!

this episode is actually how i learned about coronation street (because i’m american and therefore was not knowledgeable in the subject of british soap operas), and every time i hear about it i instantly think of caddy.

 

the fifth element (100,000 subscriber special, august 4th, 2013)

posted one day before my first day of middle school, the episode on the fifth element marked both the end of season 2 and caddy’s entry into the 6-digit club. he was now growing faster than ever, and this speed of growth was a trajectory that would continue for 2 more years.

the story in this episode was about as classic as you could get for this style of content - the world was going to end, and in order to save the world, caddy had to get through the fifth element for the PS1.

 

bratz: the splatty ratz that are gnatz covered in shatz (200,000 subscriber special, may 11th 2014)

this landmark episode was like a secondary introductory episode to 2014 fans, along with the dalmatians 3 episode that premiered two months earlier. sandwiched between these two episodes was the jungle book groove party episode, and this trio of episodes closed out season 3 and formed a story arc that stitched them together. they were filmed by olly, there were plenty of goofy skits with jim and rosie to go around, and percy even made an appearance.

this story arc was when most fans agreed the caddicarus show was starting to come into its own - after his brief encounters with telegames and whoever developed the corrie game, you had caddy finding his solidified “mortal enemy” in phoenix games. you had cheesy lore and skits over 20-year-old kids games. and it was in the bratz episode where we saw the first appearances of the mackay household in the show’s history!

jim would stop making frequent subscriber specials after this, only doing them for major milestones. and this was the last subscriber special (and caddicarus episode in general) before jim moved out of his parents’ house.

he’d go on to reach 300k subscribers just 5 months after the bratz video’s release - fans from that year in particular make up the largest group of pre-2020 caddicarus fans. as you could probably tell, 2014 was a very busy year.

it’s also the last subscriber special from a more innocent era of the channel before any rebrands or any kind of generational division between fans. back when these specials were common, the channel uploaded once a week on sunday, and you never knew which of the 5 shows at the time would be uploading.

 

the general blog meals! (2013-14)

anyone remember general blog? it wasn’t widely known throughout the caddicarus community, but i loved this channel back in the day. it was a side channel of olly’s used between 2013 and 2014 that featured vlogs with his family and friends. caddy was featured in the classic soggy bunny challenge video, and when olly did the ice bucket challenge in 2014, caddy poured the bucket for him. i rewatched these videos a good bit back then; in fact, one of the most obscure caddicarus references i know is his “I WANT BUBBLES!” outburst in the soggy bunny video.

while we didn’t get a 300k subscriber special, we did get a general blog meal video! and we also got videos to accompany the 100k and 200k specials.

for the first two installments, olly, caddy and other family and friends would head to atomic pizza. for the 300k one, they went to another restaurant called bluegrass. the 300k meal was the first and only general blog video i was around for, and i remembered anxiously waiting for a 400k meal video in 2015. but that didn’t happen as the 300k meal would be the last video ever uploaded to general blog. which is a shame because i absolutely loved these videos!

(except that olly made a beefy boys video on his main channel in 2019 that made up for those missed milestones! this one completely slipped my radar! i wonder if this weekend’s magfest vlog will count as a 700k/800k/900k/1m celebration meal vlog. XD)

i remember there was a short little clip of caddy singing in the 100k meal video, and it was the first time 12-year-old me had ever heard caddy singing decently. needless to say, i repeated that clip over and over.

i also remember when caddy revealed his business cards in the 200k video, and it was always so funny to me how he put a cooltext logo on a BUSINESS CARD.

and i think there was this one bit in the 300k video where cerys joked she was pregnant…but 12-year-old me legitimately believed she was pregnant. so i actually expected there to be a fourth mackay child by june…and of course there wasn’t one. XD

 

66 net yaroze games (500,000 subscriber special, june 26th 2016)

the season 6 finale, and the only subscriber special to have aired during the weekly caddicarus era - 66 net yaroze games is a gem within what i believed to be the start of the decline of the original caddicarus show. yes, i’ve praised seasons 6 and 7 in my tier list, but of course, this quality couldn’t be kept up every single week as this schedule kept going on beyond 2016.

in june 2016, the beautiful people were clamoring for another subscriber special of any sort, as the general blog channel had been seemingly abandoned and olly and caddy weren’t really collaborating anymore. after missing out on a 400k special a year earlier, we were eager to see what jim had in store for the 500k special. and fun fact - he actually hit 500k on his 22nd birthday! we celebrated through the rest of june, and rejoiced the release of this 30-minute beast - which was the 2nd longest caddicarus episode ever at the time! and i was in washington DC for it; therefore i had to wait a week to watch it properly. 🙃

because of this episode’s length, and the fact that 66 different games are covered in it, this episode was SUPER revolutionary for the time. and what’s even crazier is that it was produced in a week and it was still one of the greatest episodes of the 2016-19 era! back in 2017-18 when i was wishing for monthly/fortnightly caddicarus episodes to return, i remember thinking “imagine how much cooler this episode would be if jim had a couple more weeks to produce it…?”

what i find even more interesting is that jim discussed in the create unknown podcast about how he had wanted to do the “world of” style for years but couldn’t because of how scared he was to lose everything he had. and i sometimes think about how things would’ve turned out if he’d just changed to that format in early 2016 - sure, it would’ve been ballsy, but a lot of fans were still around and the stagnation hadn’t really started yet. we would’ve hit 1 mil a LOT earlier. but hey, i’m getting ahead of myself. that’s another discussion for another day!

so yeah, this episode was wonderful. it showed some of the first peeks into the 2020-present writing style and just how crazy things can get when jim looks at multiple games in one video.

 

so, what happened through those six years between this and the spyro video?

well, obviously lots of things changed. but the main reason for that six-year wait was stagnation. half of those years were spent in stagnation, with views and subscriber rates dwindling. hell, the stagnation had already been going on when the 500k special dropped - the catch is that jim only reached 500k when hedid because there was an insane side-wide increase in subscriber rates through june 13th-14th.

i remember waking up on the 13th to see the caddicarus channel growing the fastest it ever has in its history. it started out at 490-something, and by the end of the day on june 18th - when it was already june 19th in the UK - we were at the glorious half mil.

to this day, i’m not sure what caused this strange event. but nevertheless, the beautiful people were ecstatic.

the next day, caddy reacted to his rascal racers video for his 22nd birthday. and the next week, we celebrated 500k subs with net yaroze games. and two days later…

it was like nothing ever happened.

on june 28th, the major youtube subscriber purge happened. tens of thousands of subs were removed from the channel, seemingly returning us to where we were on june 13th. in fact, we were BELOW where we started…we were at 487k. it was like a dream had been fabricated for us, a dream of high subscriber rates and longer, higher-quality caddicarus episodes with lots of people flocking to them in droves.

after we experienced this brief dream, it took the channel until late august to truly reach 500k subs, and the stagnation would just continue after that. we’d be in the 500k range for two years - we had been used to going up 100k-200k every year.

in november 2018, he finally reached 600k, but there wasn’t really much fanfare as this was peak stagnation. in fact, i believe socialblade at this point projected he’d reach 1 million in 2026. nevertheless, 16-year-old me made a crab rave video for the occasion, as 16-year-olds did in late 2018. (volume warning for headphone users)

what was relieving at the time is that by the time he reached 600k, he already had his SEO guy and videos were performing slightly better than they used to. the videos would continue performing slightly better throughout the rest of 2019, until, well…december 2019 happened.

so after the revamp in 2020, the channel hit 700k in june…and had this rebrand never taken place, it would’ve also taken two years to get out of 600k hell. but alas, it only took a year and a half this time!

but what’s this? it only took under a year for the channel to reach 800k! 10 months!!

and it only took 9 months after that for the channel to reach 900k! and 8 months after that…

 

the legendary world of spyro games (1,000,000 subscriber special, december 23rd 2022)

if you’re a caddicarus veteran, you know the story. in may 2014, caddy posted on twitter that at 1 million subs, he would do a spyro retrospective. this promise was strictly kept for over 8 years, with slight changes over the years - after caddy’s retrospectives was cancelled, the spyro special went from being three separate videos to one huge caddicarus episode about the original trilogy. then it became a huge episode about every spyro game.

through the stagnation period, the hope from fans began to dwindle, and had the caddicarus channel gone completely dormant after december 2019, the special would’ve never happened at all.

yet, here we are in february 2023, almost 2 months after the 2 and a half-hour spyro video dropped.

when i was watching this video for the first time, i still couldn’t believe it was real. these skits, characters, cameos, jokes…all of these came to be within a video that used to just be an elusive, distant goal. a video that fans would theorize about as far back as 2013. now, new fans just coming in will already know what the spyro video is like. they never experienced a pre-spyro video time, when this video was enshrouded in mystery.

for older fans, it really was a shock to see this video in our sub boxes. it felt like a dream…but it wasn’t. it was finally here. and while it took so long to get to this point…this was the best possible time it could’ve happened. after all the blood, sweat and tears jim put into this channel, and after all the changes and adversity, now was the best time for a video like this to drop, because it was after he had truly perfected his craft.

this video was perfect in every way, and i couldn’t have thought of a better way to celebrate this milestone.

when i get my blu ray, i’m going to cherish it with every fiber of my being. because caddy deserves all the love in the world. 💜💜💜