Hoops & Yoyo Ruin Christmas is very much an underrated Christmas classic.
Released just under a decade ago on the most auspicious day of 25 November (this reviewer’s birthday), the 22-minute Hallmark animated special nails its happily quasi-seditious colours to the flag early on with a title hat screams playfulness and a willingness to bend the usual festive storytelling rules.
While it doesn’t quite go all out-and-out in its Christmas sedition, delivering up the expected happy ending and cosy mid sections, replete with a warm and cheery musical montages courtesy of Parry Gripp and Alan Williams, Hoops & Yoyo Ruin Christmas does have some adult-pleasing fun along the way.
The premise pivots on the idea that Hoops (Mike Adair) and Yoyo (Bob Holt) and their cute blue friend Piddles (complete with Santa lollipop and voiced by Bev Carlson) are really into Santa, so into him in fact that when he arrives on their rooftop, where they’ve lying in wait for him, binoculars in hand, they can’t resist sneaking into his sleigh where they get stuck and end up accompanying him on the next part of his physics-defying present fun. (Speaking of which, he appears to only stop at Hoops & Yoyo’s house, pity the neighbours who miss out.)
That might end up being nothing but a harmless joy ride except for the fact that while transiting the wormhole Santa uses to traverse the Earth in record time – mystery solved! Amusingly Piddles goes into a science jargon heavy explanation about what wormholes are, which in the context of the manic colourfulness and silliness of this special so far is HILARIOUS) – all three tumble out and find themselves many decades in the past where a young kris Kringle is hard at work on his first very special toy, helped along, as you are in these situations, by four chirpy, beanie-capped mice.
Without giving too much away, Hoops, Yoyo and Piddles land in such a way that the toy is destroyed as is, they soon come to realise, any chance of Kris Kringle becoming Santa Claus.
Uh oh? UH OH.
At this point of course, Hoops & Yoyo Ruin Christmas should just cease to exist at all since the gang have just erased Santa Claus and his good works from the timeline.
But Hoops & Yoyo are made of stronger stuff, well Hoops at first anyway, and they settle on a plan to save the idea of Christmas they have just ruined by helping Kris Kringle to remake his toy.
At this point, Hoops & Yoyo Ruin Christmas is pretty much what you’d expect from a Hallmark animated special with a lovely emphasis on selflessly doing what you need to do to fix the most wonderful time of the year, with a recurrent theme being that the greatest thing you can do for anyone is to put aside your dream so they can realise theirs.
It must be said that this is not a bad thing executed with so much frenetic goodwill, vibrantly colourful animation and joyful characterisation that you wholeheartedly into the idea that there is something innately Christmassy about self-sacrifice at a time of peace and goodwill to all men, women and strangely shaped and coloured people.
What makes all this welcome sweetness and light deliciously left of centre is that Hoops & Yoyo Ruin Christmas takes every opportunity to play around with set ideas about Christmas or how someone should even speak in them, with Piddles particularly going to town with the irreverent commentary.
While the special isn’t revolutionary in any real respect, it does have a lot of fun with the idea that you could fall off Santa’s sleigh, slip into a tunnel to the past, wreck a nascent toymaker’s shot at Christmas and have to work hard to fix it all, all with no guarantee of returning home to self-flushing toilets or hand sanitisers (yes, a full nine years before COVID struck, this is very much a thing for Yoyo.)
That our favourite green pink and blue friends make it home is pretty much a given, with some fun playing around with what the tenth Doctor Who calls “timey-wimey stuff” but how they get there and why is a manically silly and funny joy and delight, a reminder that you can both an earnestness and an irreverence to your Christmas storytelling and still come up with a wholly pleasing festive classic that you’ll want to again and again (along with donuts and hot chocolate and yes, self-flushing toilets).