In its prime, hoops&yoyo were relatively popular, not a household name, but something that had enough staying power to land itself on store shelves worldwide. The dynamic that the characters had was something really fresh and unique, and that stuck with a lot of people.

Of course, with anything that is popular, there will be something that tries to imitate what made it successful. hoops&yoyo was subject to such, as people attempted to create bootleg mugs, notebooks, and an entire theme park using their characters. However, more creative individuals over the years have attempted to make their own characters that are simply in the vein of hoops&yoyo, still evoking the general idea of what makes a hoops&yoyo eCard fun to watch and send, with their own voice and vision.

hoops&yoyo had a handful of parodies while it was still an active franchise, some of them only lasted a single video, most are linked to schools, and one is linked to a legitimate virus. The ones I will be covering here are all made before the franchise ended, and were a part of a bigger organization or project, so nothing that was simply published online randomly, or before hoops&yoyo were cancelled.

Yoo Yoo and Hops

In 2009, the YouTube channel @Saucydarkmatter (Jake L) would upload a video titled

“Yoo Yoo and Hops smiley adventures ep. 1”

 

Original YouTube Video Description:
“A bumper made for telos. East Hollywood High’s version of The Oscars. We have this ceremony once a year to give awards for our school’s students great work.”

The video shows a blue Yoyo and a red Hoops, walking up to a light switch in a dark black void, and turning on “A Telos as bright as the sun”, before screaming in excitement. This video was on YouTube for a long time, however was set to private around 2024, the same time it was uploaded to The Internet Archive. It was most likely set to private because that is the same time that there was a mass resurgence in popularity for the franchise, and the original uploader was more then likely being spammed with notifications. The original author of this video is also unclear, as since this was for a student award, there is a chance this was also produced by a student.

Jinx & Bobo

In December of 2012, Southwestern College posted a video to their YouTube channel

“. . . This season we offer our alumni and friends a loving and lighthearted shout-out from Jinx and Bobo (our own version of Hallmark’s Hoops and Yoyo). . .”

This animation was produced by students working in both the “member of 9 Lives Improv Comedy Troupe” and the school’s “Office of Communications and Office of Institutional Advancement” with a full list of student names appearing on the video’s description and in the video itself.

The black cat in the video, Jinx, is based on the school’s mascot The Jinx.

In 1912, the college had won a game of football against Airmount (now Wichita State University), beating them 41 to 3. To celebrate, some of the players carved the score into a limestone slab, and sitting above it, was a smug black cat, mocking Airmount. It was so popular among students, that a pseudo-serious ceremonial was held in its honor. During this, the slab was carried in a black and yellow coffin, and buried, to fully shame Airmount and put them in the ground.

In 1913, after another victory on Airmount, some students decided to dig up the grave of the slab, and take it home with them. They were all immediately stricken ill with smallpox with the coming days. This lead the group to return the slab to the library, were it was stolen again, hidden somewhere on campus.

With many believing that it being out of its grave was causing evil influence over the college, there was a hunt to find the slab and stop it’s “power” over the school. While many tried, two outsider fans, Lincoln LaPaz and Miss Phil Hanna, would hatch a perfect plan to steal it. They posed as fake incoming rich students, buying tons of students ice cream, and gaining enough trust to get into a room with the slab, finding it’s weakness, and stealing it in the night. They later showed the slab to the campus during a football game, and the “hunt” was considered over. The 12 boys and girls who participated in each of these events formed “Jinx Club”

In 1919, the slab was blown up by sticks of dynamite, with the club members deciding that it needed to be destroyed to stop it’s evil curse. Later, the college would adapt this mythology, and make the cat into it’s own mascot.

Bobo has zero story, he was just colored purple to match the school colors.

The original page the animation was hosted on is still active, with the original wallpaper for download, however the actual animation is now missing and only a video of the school is present. The original SWF is also missing.

Wofford College Video Christmas Card

Also, in December in 2012, Wofford College would release their own Christmas greeting based on hoops&yoyo, in a video posted on YouTube titled “Wofford College Admissions Marketing Video Christmas Card”

This video was produced by Whipp who specialize in creating ad campaigns and material for them. The two unnamed dogs in the video are based on the school’s mascot, an unnamed Boston Terrier. The school’s mascot does not have a red nose, or clothes, so it is assumed the two critters in the card are not “the mascot” of the school.

Besides this, there is almost no other information on this, no swf nor link that would’ve hosted this has been found, nor is anything on Internet Archive show for wofford.edu or whipp.me.

Lil’ Swoop & Red Rover

“The world may be full of dumb eCards, but at least you can be a beacon of wit when you send a Red Rover & Lil Swoop eCard. So do it already!” – ecardsfromu.utah.edu

From 2008 to 2011, University of Utah would host “eCards from U” a legitimate free eCard service that anyone could use all featuring the characters “Lil’ Swoop & Red Rover”. These characters were originally created for “FYI newsletters” that were handed out to students. A staff member had received an eCard there and got the idea to make their own eCards.

Chris Miller and Trent James, part of the comedy troupe ComedySportz, designed and voiced the characters, and made everything on only a small budget of 350 dollars.

“We were able to negotiate a very favorable deal because the animation studio was owned by (a) U alumnus,”  – Paulsen, from “U offers eCards for Valentine?”

Eight of the eCards have been recovered using the Wayback Machine:

In December 2008, the site had 5 ecards, with 4 valentines ones being added in February 2009, and a St. Patrick’s Day one in March 2009. All of the holiday eCards were removed in the summer of 2009.  As well, 2 eCards were hosted on the website’s server, but where never published on the site, “Graduation” and “Finals“. It’s likely these were also removed after a short time, and The Wayback Machine did not capture when they were up.

There is also a rejected eCard that was uploaded to a channel named “pose2poser” which the university did not approve of being on the site. It remains in an unfinished state.

PB and Jay

Hallmark.com was not the only website providing eCards, and not every website providing these was trustworthy. Case in point, MyFunCards.com. Just entering the name into Google.com comes up with dozens of results flagging the website as adware, and steps to remove it’s adware from your computer.

MyFunCards is a browser NewTab, once the user installed the extension from MyFunCards, your browser’s default landing page and “New Tabs” would be altered to visit sites owned by their parent company, MindSpark.

You may recognize some of MindSpark’s other work, such as Zwinky, SmileyCentral and CursorMania.

From 2005 to July 2024, MyFunCards maintained it’s eCard site, updating it regularly in it’s early years. As seen from this 2005 capture, the program would include lots of bloatware to infect the users PC.

Starting in 2011, users could view eCards on an online catalog without the external software, and send them to others via eMail or Facebook.

MyFunCards had several lines of character characters to send, including, but not limited to

Very scary looking 3d Zodiac signs?

A sultry anthropomorphic feline?

The free smileys!?

But the most interesting characters of all are PB and Jay:

PB and Jay are the product of Hilli Kushnir, who was hired by Mindspark to create and improve some of the assets for Zwinky and ZwinkyCuties.com, as well as Adverts and Downloadable content. During her time there, she illustrated, animated, and voiced several PB and Jay eCards by herself for the MyFunCards.com website, as seen on her old portfolio.

The majority of these animations can be found in an YouTube Video by Cyan titled “PB & Jay e-cards compilation (MyFunCards)”

When 1234Studios reached out to Hilli about an unrelated question, we got direct confirmation that this series was inspired by hoops&yoyo

Hilli Kushnir now does design and illustration, mainly for children’s books, greeting cards, games and other various children’s products.

– – – – – – – – – – –

After 2015, most parodies of hoops&yoyo were created by fans at home, without the connection to any outside institution, and the influence of hoops&yoyo is not felt at all as eMail is a dying medium of communication. These parodies, however, are proof of the influence these characters once had, and will continue to have for decades to come…

Thank you for reading this entire thing, congrats.