Lucas the Spider

The kid who voiced the spider wanted the drain scene longer.

Human Lucas was five when his uncle sat him down to play a jumping spider. Years later, when Cartoonito finally put the character on television, the boy still picked the sink short as his favorite, because Lucas falls down the drain. "It's funny and I wanted it to be longer," he told Animation World Network. Joshua Slice, the uncle, had been staring at bugs in sinks for years and thinking that scale made a different world. The TV series is that joke stretched to seven minutes.

Slice uploaded the first clip on November 5, 2017. He is a working animator with Pixar, Disney, and Blue Sky credits on Big Hero 6, Zootopia, and Epic. The spider came from a photo of a jumper on a leaf. He told Business Insider the only brief was to make a believable spider as cute as possible. Fresh TV, the Toronto shop behind Total Drama, bought exclusive rights in March 2018 after six shorts had already pulled more than 60 million views. Slice said he had not imagined the internet star the character would become, and thanked Fresh for seeing a future past those 30-second YouTube hits.,,

Tom McGillis, Fresh's president, still talks about the nephew's voice as the thing that closed the deal. The four partners got on a phone and poured it out. McGillis told Animation Magazine the CGI spider lived in a real house, Joshua's actual house, which gave the shorts a National Geographic intimacy. For television they moved the camera into a real house in Toronto and kept the photoreal bug on live-action plates. Paul Brown directed. Slice stayed on as an advisor. The star's voice went to Simon Webster. McGillis called the new read affectionate. The original Lucas stayed in the origin story.,

The merch arrived before the network. Polygon reported a talking plush, sold with Teespring, that was on pace for more than $1.2 million, with Slice saying the money would go toward a college fund for the nephew who first said the lines. More than 40,000 units moved in ten days. Then came the long-form sale. Cake, the London distributor, and Fresh sold Cartoon Network a run of 78 seven-minute shorts. Cartoonito launched the show on Saturday, September 18, 2021. The official Cartoonito trailer is a one-minute "Boop.",,

The platforms kept dropping him.

Wikipedia's table has the series leaving Cartoonito on September 23, 2022, and leaving HBO Max a week later, with three shorts still unaired in the United States. They ran in Canada. Max put season 1 back up on August 31, 2023. Netflix added season 1 on October 30, 2023, bundling the shorts into half-hours. Cartoonito brought the last three titles back on December 1, 2023, then dumped the show again the following April. A jumping spider species, Salticus lucasi, now carries the name. McGillis has said there is interest in a feature and that he cannot confirm it. The nephew still wants the drain to last.,