How About That Thing?

Earlier this week, my wife presented me with a quiz. This quiz was to determine how much of a 90s kid I truly was. Seeing as how I was between things to do, I figured why not? I’ll take this quiz.

I can’t remember which question it was anymore, but I remember the question itself: “What is Stick Stickly’s address?” Then, it switched. Like a sleeper agent hearing a code phrase, my brain recovered information that laid dorment for decades. And with no shame whatsoever, I began to sing the answer.

“Write to me, Stick Stickly. P.O. Box 963. New York City, New York State, 10108!”

My wife proceeded to laugh at me for minutes at a time. And honestly, I can’t blame her. The revelation set in after I’d sung the song for the first time since… God damn, how long has it actually been? 97? 98?

Either way, one thing remains clear: I memorized that shit. I can still remember Stick Stickly’s mailing address from back in the day without so much as a Wikipedia check, but I can’t tell you how to do basic algebra to save my life. That, right there, is fucking depressing.

And while we’re on the topic of my broken brain, and Stick Stickly, that was the launching point that got me to thinking about the good old days.

Mascot characters come and go. Sometimes, you’re glad to see them go for one reason or another, and other times, they just sort of disappear and you don’t really notice. But there was just something about Stick Stickly that just stayed with me.

I remembered hearing many years ago that in puppeteer classes, they give you a pair of googly eyes, teach you how to put them through your knuckles, and then you’re tasked to transform your hand and this random pair of googly eyes into a character with its own identity, its own voice, and to make sure no one ever at any point during your act thinks of your puppet as just a hand with googly eyes on it. I’ve never taken puppeteering classes myself, but puppeteering WAS a bit of a fascination my parents had to yell out of me at one point. Hearing about that challenge, it sounds hard as hell. I mean I can put the googly eyes on my hand no problem, but trying to make a convincing character like that? That’s got to be hard.

So imagine how good at their job these people had to be to make what is essentially a popsicle stick with googly eyes and a big yellow nose into a fully flushed out character that kids look forward to seeing every afternoon. Somehow, at the age of nine, I knew what Stick Stickly was, and I still found myself developing a bit of a fandom for the character.

Nick in the Afternoon was basically just an afternoon programming block of Nickelodeon shows. At its core, there was nothing special about it… Except for Stick Stickly himself. And for a kid like me, that was somehow enough.

As time progressed, Nick in the Afternoon would get canceled, and brought back, and canceled, and brought back… Every time they did, they’d add new segments.

My favorite of which was Stump Stick: a segment where someone would send in a riddle, and Stick Stickly would try to solve it. Of course, he’d try to dawn his “thinking cap”, only for some other sort of cap to come down and frustrate him. If Stick either got the riddle wrong, or couldn’t think of the answer, the thinking cap would pop off, and a dunse cap would appear on his head. Out of all the Stump Stick segments, I think I only ever saw Stick get, like, two or three right. Although, as an adult, I’m pretty sure whoever played Stickly played it up for the camera.

FUN FACT: my dad had to explain what a dunse cap was to me. By the time I was in school, things like dunse caps and in-class paddlings had long since been phased out in favor of “think rooms” and losing recess.

At one point, they made it seem like the selection of shows at Nick in the Afternoon was completely random. And the selection method was Stick Stickly himself being made into a spinner, and being forced to spin in order to select the show. In reality, you knew they had a concrete schedule, but I personally still found myself hoping for a whole afternoon of Ren and Stimpy. That, or I thought it’d be funny if he spent the entire afternoon just landing on the “free spin” spot over and over again.

You see? I still remember all of this! This space in my brain could be used for something far more useful. Like… Oh, I don’t know, how to get a good deal on a mortgage or something. Instead, it’s forever occupied by something as trivial and pointless as how a fucking popsicle stick hosted a programming block in 1995. It’s moments like this where I genuinely begin to wonder if I might have some sort of Aspergers syndrome after all.

But I guess it also speaks to how well the Stick Stickly character was made. He was so endearing, a near-forty-year-old rando still remembers him to this very day. It’s a shame Nickelodeon couldn’t maintain that sort of relatability as the 90s gave way to the 2000s, and Nickelodeon themselves degenerated into basically being “that network Spongebob Squarepants plays on.” Or “That network that hired those pedophiles and filled your childhood with fetish fuel”, if you’re from that era.