{"id":62,"date":"2026-05-14T18:03:06","date_gmt":"2026-05-14T22:03:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.piddles.net\/blog\/?p=62"},"modified":"2026-05-15T08:48:52","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T12:48:52","slug":"the-importance-of-listen-up-troops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.piddles.net\/blog\/2026\/05\/14\/the-importance-of-listen-up-troops\/","title":{"rendered":"The importance of “Listen Up, Troops!” in the hoops&yoyo community"},"content":{"rendered":"

During 2013 to 2015, Hallmark.com slowly began to phase out Flash-based content on their website, primarily the eCards that ran on it. hoops&yoyo heavily relied on the software, as it is what allowed it to be interactive. Letting people play with the homepages, eCards, and “funimations” all had played a large factor into what made it stand out and kept users on the website.<\/p>\n

In 2015, hoops&yoyo stopped production after a series of mass lay offs at the company<\/a> during the summer of that year. In these lay offs was the original series creator Bob Holt<\/a>, who was told that hoops&yoyo did not fit into the “humor” that Hallmark wanted. During this time, a lot of other animation-focused projects were cut or ceased production, and the focus was no longer on eCards. All future hoops&yoyo merchandise was made reusing\/editing renders or prints already produced<\/a>, and was limited to print only cards.<\/p>\n

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Some of the eCards were converted into video format, and kept up on the site, until April 1st, 2021, when the Hallmark eCard website displayed the following message:<\/p>\n

“”April 30, 2021 will be the last date of Hallmark eCards service. Starting May 1, 2021, you will no longer be able to access www.hallmarkecards.com, send eCards, receive eCards, or access your account. It has been a privilege to support you in strengthening your relationships through the use of eCards.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Because Flash was phased out so early on, a large amount of the content that was on the Hallmark.com website was not properly archived. For a long while, the only way to experience the content of hoops&yoyo was to seek out the very few saved SWFs, spread across The Wayback Machine<\/a> \/ FlashMuseum<\/a>, as well as Alec Comes’ video, “Every single Hoops & Yoyo eCard that was on Hallmark’s website before they were taken down<\/a>” which, as the title implies, was a compilation of every single hoops&yoyo video file the website had before the shutdown notice in 2021. Still, a lot of the animated content was missing, and the downloadable files, such as wallpapers, screensavers, etc.. were harder to access and had no cohesive place to view them all.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, around the same early years of 2021, founder and webmaster of piddles.net Cyan<\/a> would slowly begin to download files relating to hoops&yoyo. Immediately she noticed its content was poorly documented or mostly lost to time. Soon it became her goal to archive the franchise, and host it’s content on a website. During this time, she was able to gather the initial batch of eCards from Flashpoint Flashfreeze<\/a> which hosted a capture of all of the ecards from a public AWS bucket of Hallmark Australia. Days were spent picking through these, and Wayback Machine captures, to properly gather everything she needed for the project. In October 2022, the first drafts of piddles.net began to form.<\/p>\n

In December 2022, The One Donut A Day Blog<\/a> was opened by defconcitydotcom. This blog’s main goal was to try and archive what was still available online for hoops&yoyo, similar to Cyan. From late 2022 to mid-2024, this blog and associated YouTube Channel<\/a> was the first major post mortem hub for fans of hoops&yoyo and those interested in its history. It helped to gather a small community of regular people, who were all interested in archiving the franchise’s work. During this time, however, there was no place for all of the files to be easily accessed by anyone, there was no major community hub to discuss finding specific material, and there were very few interested in the search.<\/p>\n

Among these people, was Cyan, who in June 2024, finally unveiled piddles.net, which was a website archive of everything she had gathered from scraping the internet. It was built from the ground up all on her own, code, graphics, and putting in the plugins to get other site features working. Alongside it was the piddles.net Discord server<\/a>, which in its early days was referred to as “the hoops&yoyo archive”. This was not the only hoops&yoyo Discord at the time; however, it was the most mature, structured, and focused one. It was built with the goal in mind of not only providing a space for people to discuss the series and socialize, but to gather information about hoops&yoyo and document it. This opened the floodgates for the first ever serious lost media searches started for this franchise on a team scale.<\/p>\n

As a more cohesive catalog of items was created, and the hunt for specific items began, some files\/animations\/images became more sought after than others. This was due to a variety of reasons; some lost eCards like Favorite Foods do not leave themselves much to the imagination. Not only is the title not informative, but the thumbnail is generic…<\/p>\n

\"\"and thus searching for a card like this was seen as less interesting compared to something like “I Really Moved!”, which gave an idea of what the card was like, and also had a more interesting thumbnail, with the duo across from each other in separate skyscrapers.<\/p>\n

\"\"Every card was valued equally, but some card over time had gathered more attention then others because of the idea of “what could be on it”. However, one card gained this reputation more then any other eCard, “Listen Up, Troops!”<\/p>\n

\"\"At first glance, this looks about as mundane or simple as the majority of the other eCards, it’s really just the duo standing in a white, slightly blue gradient void holding American flags. However, while digging for information on this specific card, 1234Studios’ old forum post<\/a> from 2022 resurfaced. In this forum post, he writes:<\/p>\n

“Lost Hoops & Yoyo thing that is one of Yoyo’s earliest appearances (if not the first)<\/em><\/p>\n

This is something I found on an archived page of the Hoops & Yoyo site called “listen up, troops!”. Unfortunately, the “listen up, troops!” wasn’t archived when available to play as the link keeps redirecting to a Hallmark 404 page. Note the eye size difference in Yoyo”<\/em><\/p>\n