Lenstar Productions, or lemurboy123 (real name Jacob Lenard), and originally lemurboy12 is an user and animator on YouTube.
Having first posted videos in 2010, Lenard is mostly known for his Mugman series which first appeared in 2014, but has made other animated series as well. His original pre-2010 videos and Ustreams as lemurboy12 were lost due to a channel termination; those early animations were created in PowerPoint, or were puppet stop motions he made as a very young child. There were likely no backups, as these videos never resurfaced.
View his videos here.
Works that Lenstar has made:
- Mugman
- Plancy's World - A Dora the Explorer parody starring a girl named Plancy, who has a flower pot on her head that is the home of an angry, snarky, spiteful flower with a bowler hat and a Brooklyn accent named... Flower. The series portrays Plancy like Dora via a ditzy personality, and Flower constantly nags at her for being so dumb.
- Albi and Azul - A series about an alligator named Abbi and a frog named Azul who have wacky adventures in a swamp where it is always raining. These adventures are always centered around the acquisition of food.
- Evaporate - An incredibly surreal, deliberately low-quality series based off of some dreams the show's creator had. This series stars two characters: a gray cat named Nerv, and a girl named Necky (originally named Evaporate and Necklinne, respectively).
- Pike's Lagoon - A cartoon following the misadventures of a fish monster named Pike, and her friends Frilligan, Cecile, her pet Horseshoe Crab "Limbo", as well as antagonists like the Sea Pumpkin. The show is likely cancelled, but you'll often see characters of this series appearing occasionally in the next work on the list.
- Loose Ends - A spiritual successor to Mugman, the series follows an everyman named Sammy, his girlfriend Desdemona (or Dez, who first appeared with an older design depicting her as an anthropomorphic pea on a fork in Mugman), and their adopted alien daughter Maggie (who wears a helmet that translates her thoughts into English).
- In the channel's early days, Lenard made a series of bizarre SpongeBob SquarePants shorts in Source Filmmaker that often featured the characters in scenarios from the series, but always with a different outcome, be they good (SpongeBob lands on his pants and doesn't break his butt) or bad (the old man in "The Bully" proves to be a deadly martial artist and takes out all of the Bikini Bottomites, as well as a bus). Other shorts involve various oddball scenarios, such as Mario using Patrick as an invicibility star and then dying when he touches Squidward, coconuts falling from the sky and hitting everyone (only to be a video game Patrick is playing on a Nintendo 3DS, the floating shopping list from "One Krabs' Trash" chasing the Bikini Bottomites, Squidward calling out an imposter Mr. Krabs (simply because he was voiced by Joe Whyte instead of Clancy Brown, with the real Mr. Krabs arriving to kill his doppelganger), and the Hungry Pumkin trying to order fish at the Krusty Krab, only to get thrown out for obvious reasons. More often than not, the shorts involve a large amount of violence and explosions. For some time, these videos were seen as an Old Shame by Lenard and made private, but he later made them public again after the fans demanded it.
His works provide examples of:
- Berserk Button: Steven Universe and shows similar to it.
- Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch: Jacob tends to do this a lot. He often sees visuals and animation quality as a more important aspect than writing, story and plot, and has regarded the 2010s as one of the worst decades for animation.
- Creator Backlash: Too many to note. Especially with Mugman.
- Creator's Pest: The characters Johnny and Papa from Mugman. They were quite popular, but Jacob did not like using them for reasons that you'll see in the following examples. The characters, specifically Johnny would eventually somewhat come back to bite Jacob in his ass.
- Deranged Animation: His cartoons can be really weird, but Evaporate is a special case. It helps that they are based on Jacob's actual dreams.
- Medium Blending: In several works such as Evaporate and Loose Ends 2D animation is mixed with cheesy 90s-style CGI, paper cut-outs and other things.
- Old Shame: Jacob sees a lot of his old videos and animations as this.
- Reclusive Artist: After allegations (seen below) came to light in 2021, Jacob has locked his Twitter account and privated all of his videos on YouTube, only to relist them a few days later (including relisting some of his Old Shame videos, presumably on accident or for not caring much anymore) with comments turned off.
- Reality Subtext: In one episode of the now cancelled Mugman's Mixed Media series of videos:Mugman: Hello, boys and girls! ...and whatever else there is these days.
- Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Near the end of 2020, his long time (former) Best Friend Ben Brown, also known as HellFire, who had been working with Jacob on several projects, came forward to hold Jacob accountable for several homophobic and transphobic remarks in the past. Jacob's apology attempt did not convince many. This may have caused a very light impact on his career, but it all went downhill in 2021 when a situation hidden away from public for 6 years came to light regarding Jacob mistreating his peers during the Mugman era, including accusations of badmouthing one of his former VAs in private, eventually leading to the disfigurement and attempted suicide of the VA in question. He has since claimed the accusation of him being responsible for their suicide attempt to be false and exaggerated, and that she was actually fired due to unpleasant behavior.
- Signature Style: Charming amateur-ish animation, especially in earlier works such as Mugman, inspired many young aspiring artists to pursue creating their own web animations.
- Surreal Humor: Most of the skits in Evaporate, and many old videos, mostly made in Microsoft 3D Movie Maker and Source Filmmaker.
- The Parody: Plancy's World.
