Glove and Boots

Glove and Boots was a puppet-based video blog. The two main characters are a red, bearded humanoid named Mario, and an anthropomorphic groundhog named Fafa. Their name comes from the characteristics of the puppets.

Glove and Boots was created by Damien Eckhardt-Jacobi and Vincent "Vinny" Bova, who first started puppeteering in the New York subways in 2004.1 Realizing that "Mario and Fafa begging New Yorkers for change"[1] was not the way to do things, Damien and Vincent began posting online videos. Their earliest videos were a pastiche of early edutainment shows like Sesame Street and The Electric Company, complete with some music videos.[2]

By 2010, the format received some changes in technology, and switched to a slightly older demographic, with more pop culture references. Bento Box produced these with both Damien and Vincent.[2]

In 2012, Glove and Boots won a Twitter Shorty Award for Best Videoblogger.[3] In May 2018, Glove and Boots won a Sliver Telly Award.[3]

In late 2017, Glove and Boots decided to retire from YouTube due to a downfall of viewership, but soon returned in late 2018. They went back to their original audience: kids. The reboot focuses less on characters like Johnny T, Hanzi, etc. and instead focus on only Mario, Fafa, and Gorilla. The gorilla head no longer appears. Shows like Mario's Word Of The Week, Uncle Joe's Stories, and Don't be a Jerk were all discontinued. Instead, they introduced Let's Meet Some Interesting Characters, Forgotten Legends, No Script Day, and Nerd Chat. They started deleting some of their old videos, and re-uploading them on Vimeo. Their "pivot," as they like to call it, was met with mixed reviews, criticizing their poor decisions because of YouTube's algorithm, which caused their downfall. Instead of Bento Box, Glove and Boots is currently being produced by Moonbug Entertainment.

As of December 30, 2019, no new videos have been made on their YouTube. Most people blame the new policy on YouTube enforced by the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), alongside the global COVID-19 Pandemic. But the possible main reasons Glove and Boots became inactive would be that the show's creators had opened a new channel on May 9, 2019 entitled "The Ring-a-Tangs" (also produced by Moonbug Entertainment) which the show's creators became so attached to, they've eventually abandoned the Glove and Boots YouTube channel and later their Social Platforms, now this could be false since it has been 4 months since they uploaded on it. Another reason could be that the show's co-creator, Vincent "Vinny" Bova who played Fafa the Groundhog had moved out of Brooklyn, New York (where the show was filmed) to Pennsylvania in August 2020.[4] So as of December 2020, all of their platforms are completely inactive altogether.