No-Life specials

No-Life specials are an irregular, annual series on The Philmer's channel. The main character is No-Life, who has incredible adventures during holiday season. Each special is an adaptation of some Christmas story or film. Originally, there was supposed to be only one special - A Christmas Carol by No-Life - but as the main character was incorporated by Dr Saturn into the Spyman's Cosmos Universe, soon new ideas were born. The specials are the only videos in Spyman's Cosmos where characters don't use speech bubbles, but speak with a dubbed voice or a speech synthesizer. Due to that, there have been many doubts if they actually are a part of the universe. However the 2019 special, How No-Life Stole Christmas, featured characters of Caddict, Charles and Phil, who have all appeared in many of previous installments and thus officially confirmed the special's connection to Spyman's Cosmos.
The first special, A Christmas Carol by No-Life, was released in 2016 in both Polish and English version. First one premiered on the Christmas Eve and the latter on Christmas Day. In 2017, an idea was born to make annual No-Life Christmas specials and the works on No-Life's Home Alone began. However, due to personal reasons, the special wasn't finished in time and was released on Christmas of 2018. The third - How No-Life Stole Christmas - premiered with a small delay on December 29, 2019. The fourth and the latest special - No-Life's Alone in Paris - was released with a bigger delay on January 13, 2021, but is still considered a 2020 video.
== Specials ==
As of right now there are three specials. Although there was a one year break between the first and the second one, they are still seen as annual and each next one is expected to premiere year by year.
NO-LIFE SPECIALS
No. 	Title 	Release date 	Length
1 	A Christmas Carol by No-Life 	December 24, 2016 (PL)
December 25, 2016 (ENG)	6:33 (PL)
6:26 (ENG)
2 	No-Life's Home Alone 	December 25, 2018 	9:51
3 	How No-Life Stole Christmas 	December 29, 2019 	16:08
4 	No-Life's Alone in Paris 	January 13, 2021 	27:53
Upcoming 	Upcoming 	Upcoming 	Upcoming
5 	It's a Wonderful No-Life 	Christmas 2021 	-
Total (without Polish version)	Total (without Polish version)	Total (without Polish version)	1:00:08
== History ==
=== 2015 ===
In the beginning of December 2015, The Philmer was planning his return to YouTube with a third channel. After two failed attempts, he was still looking for something he would like to do, which was animation. As Christmas was approaching, he thought of entering the platform with a Christmas special. At that time his class had A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens as a set book. One day, coming back from school, The Philmer asked himself a question "what would happen, if the book took place in the present day and the main character was someone from the surrounding nowadays?". After some thoughts he came up with an idea to put a modern kid, addicted to computer, smartphone and anything electronic, as the protagonist. The idea was inspired by seeing many kids in his school, constantly using phones and playing senseless games. That way No-Life was created and soon, The Philmer started coming up with a story, which he titled after the novel - A Christmas Carol by No-Life.
The video didn't have a script and the whole story he came up with was just a raw sketch in his head. Despite that, The Philmer began animating a day before Christmas Eve, but as it was too late, he did not manage to finish it on time. In fact, only about 20 frames were created. In that version of the special, there weren't any character templates and all frames of were drawn by hand. Due to The Philmer changing his computer over the next year, and most likely deleting all the frames before that anyway, all pictures were lost. However one remained thanks to The Philmer sharing it in 2015 on his account on Polish site NK. 
=== 2016 ===
At the end of November 2016, Philmer was starting to think about doing a Christmas video. Initially, he wanted to do two Christmas specials in one year. One of which was supposed to be a Christmas episode of his main channel series Team Y. However the idea was abandoned due to only one episode being released at the time, while having the urge to set the special after the finale of season one. Another reason was a massive amount of work that had to be done in less than a month. The other special was supposed to be A Christmas Carol by No-Life remaster and it was this idea that was put into life.
The production on the special started on December 11, 2016 on a slow note. Not much has been done throughout the next few days and majority of the frames was made from December 22 to December 24, with the most on the Christmas Eve. This special also did not have a script, but the lines for characters were created when entering the text into speech synthesizer, or when writing subtitles while editing the video, in case of No-Life and his grandmother. The Philmer barely finished all the frames before leaving for a Christmas Eve supper with his family and when he came back home, he spent the evening on editing the special. A Christmas Carol by No-Life is the only No-Life special to have two language versions - a Polish and an English one. That is because in 2016, The Philmer used to release videos in both the language he was focusing on (English) and his native one (Polish). Polish version premiered on December 24, 2016 a few minutes before midnight, while English one was released thirteen hours later, already on December 25, Christmas Day.
Originally, the special was intended to be separate from any other universe The Philmer created or collaborated on. 
=== 2017 ===
Somtime mid-2017 Dr Saturn commented under The Philmer's most recent video, telling him about an idea he had for a video. It was supposed to feature No-Life and its title would be No-Life's Holidays, and as the title says, present the titular character's shenanigans during summer holidays. However it was cancelled due to unknown reasons.
On June 28, 2017, Us vs. Us 2/4 by Dr Saturn premiered and incorporated both No-Life and his debut video into Spyman's Cosmos. The same day he messaged The Philmer with an idea for another No-life Christmas special, which he suggested to be titled No-Life's Home Alone, a parody of the movie Home Alone, which was met with The Philmer's positive reaction and approval. Agreeing that they won't have much time during school year, they decided to start working on it already during vacation and split it into two parts, with each one being released on their respective channels. The two began writing the script on the same day. Thanks to the collaboration, some characters of Dr Saturn were modified and became The Philmer's property, such as the main villains of the specials. One thought of The Philmer suggested putting two members of BSoD's gang in the role of house robbers from original movie, but it was quickly thrown away. Instead, two semi-new characters were created - Tobias Galway and Lars Greenshire, whose names were soon changed to Tobias Sanders and Larry Mealey.
The proccess of writing the script was quite long and chaotic, as the entirety of it was being written on NK-talk, a poorly developed chat on the mentioned NK site. On August 2, 2017, Dr Saturn stepped down from the project to focus on his own, later cancelled, series called ADVENTure, that was supposed to have 24 parts, with each being released every day of December until the Christmas Eve. That way, the special became a one video and rest of the script was written by The Philmer. Despite that, Saturn was still credited as a creator. The script was finished sometime in August with it's final version being completed on September 26, 2017.
The production was supposed to start in November of 2017, but due to Philmer's personal problems, including depression, it was delayed. It finally started on December 9, but as The Philmer still had a lot of unsolved issues in his live, the production went very slow, to the point that the scene with the robbers' first appearance was being made on Christmas Eve. After getting used to the fact that he won't finish it in time, The Philmer wanted to work over the night of December 24/25, but couldn't finish the video due to catching the cold. Finally, he gave up the work in the afternoon of Christmas Day and abandoned it for almost a year, without even posting an announcement. The fact is, that there still was a lot of things in his life that required fixing it, but it couldn't been done for the next few months.
=== 2018 ===
Despite failing in 2017, The Philmer still planned to release No-Life's Home Alone next Christmas. After evolving in animation and coming back to YouTube with a big return, he decided to remaster all the frames that were ugly, due to being made in rush and also remake some of the templates. The production was restarted on November 13, 2018 and lasted until December 24, 2018. The editing took place on the night of the Christmas Day. The special finally had its premiere on December 25 and received a lot of positive reactions. It also became The Philmer's favourite special, especially in terms of the animation, which in his opinion, was better than at some moments in next year's one. 
=== 2019 ===
During the production of No-Life's Home Alone in 2018, The Philmer already had plans for the 2019 special to be an adaptation of How The Grinch Stole Christmas! by Dr. Seuss, but the idea was born even earlier, in 2017, during the writing of No-Life's Home Alone script with Dr Saturn. 
In 2019 there were plans to use No-Life outside of holiday season with a spin-off series titled No-Life's Tales. It was supposed to premiere in late spring or early summer. However it was cancelled due to the lack of ideas and thus No-Life maintained a Christmas character.
Preparations for the annual special began in August of 2019. It was then when The Philmer came up with an idea to feature Caddict, Charles and Lenny in it, when he was thinking who could replace Lucy Lou from the original story. Instead of going with No-Life's sister Otillie, he decided to put three characters in the role of one character and make it that they don't just convince No-Life to not destroy Christmas, but also accidentally make him destroy it in the first place. This concept was inspired by the cancelled No-Life's Tales miniseries, which was supposed to feature the three in recurring roles, often seen pranking No-Life and being mainly comic reliefs.
Works on the script began on August 12, 2019 and its first version was finished on September 2, with some minor changes later. The final changes on October 13 of the same year. In November of 2019 one scene was deleted from the script, thus creating a second version of it. Finally, the third and last version was created on December 15, 2019. Some of the action-packed scenes were deleted from it and the story was shortened a little bit, so it could have been finished in time.
Pre-production, consisting of making concept arts, creating character templates and drawing some of the backgrounds, began on October 27, 2019 and ended on November 10. The actual production - that is the animating - began a day later. Due to real life responsibilities and complicated animation, the special wasn't finished in time, but instead of giving up like two years before, The Philmer decided to cut himself out from the world for a few days and finish it in peace. The animation was finally finished on December 27 and the editing took the entire next day. How No-Life Stole Christmas had its YouTube premiere on December 29 at 12:00 PM (CET).
=== 2020 ===
In his video called 2019 recap & 2020 plans, The Philmer confirmed another No-Life special, expected to release on Christmas of 2020. One of the stories he wanted to adapt was The Santa Clause, while another one was a No-Life's Home Alone sequel, inspired by Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. The latter was chosen to be the source material over the next months. The city, which was supposed to be visited by No-Life was decided in Spring of 2020. Out of three most prefered options were: Berlin, Bosjorn City or Paris, with the latter being chosen in the end. Thus, No-Life's Alone in Paris was born.
When the ideas for the Troublesome Trio and L.O.V.E were developed more and more, The Philmer came up with an idea for a summer general Spyman's Cosmos special, that could premiere the summer after No-Life's Alone in Paris. This gave him the idea to use the No-Life special as a set up of certain elements before they're more expanded on in the road trip video.
Ideas for the special popped up in The Philmer's mind already in April, however the actual production on the special didn't begin until barely ten days before Christmas, due to a huge crunch caused by In Search of the Scarlet Griffin 5/5, Lenny's Vlogs, which both had to be released before the special, and his fifth anniversary special, which had to premiere at the same time as No-Life's Alone in Paris. Eventually, the production continued over Christmas and after New Years' Day, to finally end on January 10, 2021. The editing lasted for almost three days and the video finally premiered on January 13.
=== 2021 ===
On February 27, 2021, The Philmer released a Channel Update, which featured a slate with his plans for the rest of the year. There, it was announced that the 2021 No-Life special would be titled It's a Wonderful No-Life and that it would be the last one. However, the possibility of more specials isn't out of the question. More details are yet to be revealed.
== Characters ==
List indicators
The table below features all of the most important characters in No-Life's specials series.
* A tick (✔) indicates the character's appearances.
* C indicates that the character appeared as a cameo.
* M indicates that the character was only mentioned in some form.
* V indicates that the character only appeared through a voice role.
LIST OF NO-LIFE SPECIALS CAST
Character 	A Christmas Carol by No-Life
(2016) 	No-Life's Home Alone
(2018) 	How No-Life Stole Christmas
(2019) 	No-Life's Alone in Paris
(2020)
Introduced in A Christmas Carol by No-Life	Introduced in A Christmas Carol by No-Life	Introduced in A Christmas Carol by No-Life	Introduced in A Christmas Carol by No-Life	Introduced in A Christmas Carol by No-Life
No-Life 	✔ 	✔ 	✔ 	✔
No-Life's Mom 	✔ 	✔ 	✔ 	✔
No-Life's Grandma 	✔V 	✔V 	 	
No-Life's Dad 	✔ 	✔ 	✔ 	✔C
Ghost of the Past Christmas 	✔ 	M 	 	
Ghost of the Present Christmas 	✔ 	 	 	
Ghost of the Future Christmas 	✔ 	 	 	
Introduced in No-Life's Home Alone 	Introduced in No-Life's Home Alone 	Introduced in No-Life's Home Alone 	Introduced in No-Life's Home Alone 	Introduced in No-Life's Home Alone
Auntie Florence 	 	M 	 	✔C
No-Life's Grandpa 	 	✔V 	 	
Tobias Sanders 	 	✔ 	 	✔
Larry Mealey 	 	✔ 	 	✔
Policeman Henry 	 	✔ 	✔ 	
Henry 	 	✔C 	✔ 	✔
James 	 	✔C 	✔ 	
Introduced in How No-Life Stole Christmas 	Introduced in How No-Life Stole Christmas 	Introduced in How No-Life Stole Christmas 	Introduced in How No-Life Stole Christmas 	Introduced in How No-Life Stole Christmas
Otillie 	 	 	✔ 	✔
Alex 	 	 	✔ 	
Charles 	 	 	✔ 	
Lenny Jester 	 	 	✔ 	
Caddict 	 	 	✔ 	
Rose 	 	 	✔C 	✔
Phil 	M 	 	✔C 	✔C
Introduced in No-Life's Alone in Paris 	Introduced in No-Life's Alone in Paris 	Introduced in No-Life's Alone in Paris 	Introduced in No-Life's Alone in Paris 	Introduced in No-Life's Alone in Paris
Airport lady 	 	 	 	✔C
Jenny Brown 	 	 	 	✔C
The Mime 	 	 	 	✔
Fast Bill 	 	 	 	✔
Le Collecteur 	 	 	 	✔
Gun henchman #84 	 	 	 	✔
== Trivia ==
Category:No-Life specials
Category:Spyman's Cosmos series
Category:Series