Stick Stickly

Stick Stickly was about as simple as a mascot can get: a craft stick with googly eyes, a small yellow jelly-bean nose and a grin, the sort of thing a bored kid could make during the second week of vacation. He was created by Agi Fodor and Karen Kuflik and voiced by Paul Christie. From 1995 to 1998 he hosted Nick in the Afternoon, Nickelodeon's summer weekday-afternoon block — which is to say he presided over the exact hours when American children had nothing to do.

Almost nothing about the job was his to decide. "U-Pick" handed the schedule to viewers, who voted on what aired next. "U-Dip" went further and dunked him into whatever mess viewers had picked. For a host he was a remarkably passive object, which was the whole joke: the kids picked the shows, the kids wrote the letters, and the stick just sat there taking it.

The jingle is what survived: "Write to me, Stick Stickly, PO Box 963. New York City, New York state, 10108!" The odd formality of "New York state" — rather than plain New York — is the part people still get right decades on. It is a mailing address, sung, lodged in a generation's memory by a popsicle stick. He came back in 2011 to host "U-Pick with Stick" on TeenNick's The '90s Are All That, by then fronting nostalgia for the summers he had presided over himself.