this entry was originally supposed to cover both the film review shows and the caddy show, but it just ended up being way too long. so the next entry will cover the caddy show, and the one after will cover the second channel :)

caddy’s film fridays/cinemaggots (february 19th, 2016 - may 2nd, 2018)

established after the channel’s first major rebrand in february 2016 as a way for caddy to discuss films on his channel, caddy’s film fridays was the first show on the channel to not solely be focused on video games. of course the caddicarus show had just started experimenting with episodes about movies, but it was still first and foremost a show about video games.

cerys’ contributions to this series through her editing made the 3-days-a-week schedule more doable, though caddy would later express that this schedule made him enormously stressed.

the caddy’s film fridays iteration of the film review series ran from february 2016 to february 2017, and it made up 33 of the 52 episodes. it reused the tinker time intro - just with caddy screaming “caddy’s film fridays!” instead. i honestly thought tinker time’s intro was better but that’s just me lol.

this show had two segments: “my thoughts on” and “kids explain”. most episodes were in the my thoughts on format, which was just caddy sitting in his office talking about any kind of film. kids explain was easily the most notable and memorable aspect of the series, where caddy would interview phoebe and amy about any kind of movie or TV show. they’ve tackled star wars, cool cat saves the kids, peppa pig, jaws, and more. so many iconic moments with those two. oh, and fun fact - the “what’s the point?” clip from the platinum relics video is from the star wars kids explain.

in spring 2017, the caddick-mackay household experienced an unfortunate string of events - ranging from caddy’s reheated meatball tragedy to cerys breaking her ankle. the combination of these events along with cerys’ other work caused the production of CFF to be put on hold, and this was properly addressed in an update video in april 2017. caddy said that he had been coming up with ideas for another show about films that could upload at any time with less stress. and this led to cinemaggots!

you know i’m a pre-2020’s caddicarus fan because i CANNOT hear the current subscribe jingle without the deep piano note playing in my head.

although this was a new format with a different name, cinemaggots was still in the same playlist as CFF. this iteration made up the last 19 of the 52 episodes. kids explain was still around and was as iconic as ever, and the proper review episodes had a little more pizzazz to them - they now starred both caddy and cerys! the episode on pirates of the caribbean also featured chloe, so this is the one other show on the channel that had the entire family in on it.

this was uploaded pretty regularly in 2017, but there was a huge gap between the last two episodes. the penultimate episode on the last jedi was uploaded in december 2017, but the final episode - a kids explain on the phantom menace - aired in may 2018, several months later. after this, the show was quietly canceled. caddy officially acknowledged and confirmed cinemaggots’ cancellation that november, stating that cerys has been too busy with her side businesses.

so this show started and ended with a kids explain about a star wars movie. how poetic.

so as far as the fan reception to this film review series went, it was…lukewarm? i mean, kids explain was the big draw and even those didn’t do spectacularly well, even for the channel’s size at the time. the regular review videos performed a lot worse; before the series was privated and then unlisted, the cinemaggots on murder on the orient express was the worst performing video on the already-stagnating-at-the-time channel, only bringing in 17k views.

there wasn’t really anyone who loved this show to bits and dropped everything to watch it, but neither was there anyone who really hated it. it just kinda…existed? i personally watched all of them as they were released but that was pretty much because i made an effort to watch every single video caddy released; i remember very little about the series apart from stuff like the intros, endigo’s 8-bit outro, cerys’ editing, and kids explain of course. looking back on some of the videos, though, i find the series - especially the cinemaggots era - pretty underrated. yeah barely any beautiful people during the 3-videos-a-week era were wanting to watch a game reviewer talk about films, but the videos were still good regardless. although that’s just my bias because i absolutely love caddy’s family.

as a result of The Great Caddicarus Video Purge of October 24th, 2021, the entire series was privated along with other older videos. to this day i’m not sure exactly why he privated the whole series; i’m sure he’s said why in a stream but i don’t have the time and energy to skim through a bunch of those. i mean there was this Instagram comment that’s pretty straightforward about it.

but one day in september 2022, the playlist miraculously returned, with every video unlisted except for three - here’s a few links to the crow, the emoji movie and the IT (2017) videos. 😉

after this, there wasn’t another film-focused series on the channel again…or was there?

 

~ the mysterious case of the lost second caddicarus film review series (may 2019) ~

may 2019 was a rough month for the caddicarus channel. i’ll go into more depth about this in a future entry on what i call the channel’s second intermediate period. but in short, the channel only gained about 300 subscribers due to a huge loss in subs mid-month, there was a divisive sponsored video that probably contributed to the sub drop, caddy had a very messy network transition for ads that resulted in his entire channel being demonetized, and by june he nearly had to quit because of just how bad things were getting.

(gonna provide images for community posts for mobile users because apparently, links to community posts don’t work on mobile. yeesh.)

during this month, we saw two videos that never again saw the light of day after the few days they were up. there was an update video that someone thankfully saved and uploaded to the internet archive, and the pilot episode of a film review series that would’ve been bite-sized reviews of new films.

we do have proof of this pilot being released - here’s the facebook post announcing its release, and here’s this french imdb-esque website that has its thumbnail archived. i do think i remember watching this when it was sent to me by my fandom friend; i’d stopped watching the channel a couple months prior but she kept updating me on things. i remember the video was under a minute long and looked like it was quickly put together in the mobile imovie app. there wasn’t a fancy intro or outro, it was literally just jim talking about detective pikachu with no music. unfortunately, while i was able to grab the link from the facebook post, the wayback machine didn’t have any captures. so therefore, the video is lost to time.

curiously, the aforementioned update video was the one inverted-thumbnail-with-cryptic-title update video (aside from the madness season 3 announcement) that didn’t make the cut for the unlistings in september. that video didn’t only announce this failed series, but also the repurposing of the second channel, updated patreon tiers, increased social media presence, and experiments with the caddicarus show.

 

caddy eventually got a letterboxd account, and began promoting his reviews on social media and youtube community posts. and after a while, he stopped doing that. he still updates his letterboxd frequently, but it’s no longer linked in his channel about page - it’s only linked in the descriptions of his videos. with this and the unlisting of the CFF/cinemaggots videos, you gotta dig a little deeper to find his film opinions these days. which is fine - people have always primarily tuned into caddicarus for monty python insanity about video games.

all in all, i enjoyed my time watching the film reviews back in the day, despite me forgetting a lot of it. it was a good outlet for caddy to express his passion for film - you can see that passion in his massive blu-ray collection that was showcased in just about every video pre-brick wall era! he honestly seems like he prefers films over video games…video games are just what he ended up specializing in on his channel. i believe he was even trying to get into the film and TV industry before youtube.

man i didn’t expect to go on about the film videos for this long lmao. get ready for the next entry where i go deep into the history of the caddy show and all the twists and turns it had.