Daria

Daria
Genre	Sitcom
Format	Teen animation
Created by	Glenn Eichler Susie Lewis Lynn
Starring	Tracy Grandstaff Wendy Hoopes Julián Rebolledo Marc Thompson Alvaro J. Gonzalez
Country of origin	United States
No. of seasons	5
No. of episodes	65 2 TV movies 1 animatic pilot (List of episodes)
Production
Running time	21–22 minutes (episodes), 66–75 minutes (TV-movies)
Broadcast
Original channel	MTV
Picture format	4:3 (NTSC)
Audio format	Stereo
First shown in	December 29, 1996
Original run	March 3, 1997 (1997-03-03) – January 21, 2002 (2002-01-21)

Daria is an American animated television series that ran on the cable network MTV from 1997 to 2002. Created by Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn, the series about a smart, acerbic, and somewhat misanthropic high school girl was a spin-off of MTV's animated Beavis and Butt-head (1993–1997).^{[1] [2]}

The series was widely praised for versatile storytelling and for well-drawn characters, took many satirical jabs at high-school life, and was full of allusions to and criticisms of popular culture, especially then-current pop music.

Contents 1 History 2 Plot and setting 3 Characters 4 Production 5 Satirical elements 6 Music and licensing 7 Networks 8 Reception 9 Home video 10 Books 11 Games 12 Related media 13 References 14 External links

History

Daria Morgendorffer's first appearances were as a recurring character in Beavis and Butt-head, which featured two comically ignorant and vulgar teenage boys. MTV senior vice president and creative director Abby Terkuhle explained that when that show "became successful, we ... created Daria's character because we wanted a smart female who could serve as the foil."^[3] During the final season of Beavis and Butt-head, MTV representatives approached story editor Glenn Eichler, offering a spin-off series for Daria. A five-minute pilot, "Sealed with a Kick", was created by Eichler and Beavis and Butt-head staffer Susie Lewis. MTV gave a greenlight for a series order of 13 episodes. Eichler and Lewis became executive producers.^[4]

The first episode of Daria aired on March 3, 1997 (about nine months before Beavis and Butt-head ended its original run). Titled "Esteemsters", it featured Daria and her previously unseen family members settling into their new hometown of Lawndale (having moved from Highland, the setting for Beavis and Butt-head). Now given center stage, Daria's caustic and sardonic personality became stronger.

The series ran for five seasons, with 13 episodes each, and two TV movies were also produced. The first movie, Is It Fall Yet?, aired in 2000. MTV planned a six-episode sixth season, but at Eichler's request this project was cut down to a second movie, Is It College Yet?, which served as the series finale in January 2002.

Plot and setting

Daria centered on a smart, overtly sardonic, and extremely pessimistic upper-middle-class teenage girl, Daria Morgendorffer, dealing with day-to-day life in her suburban American town, Lawndale. In a 2005 interview, series co-creator Glenn Eichler described the otherwise unspecified locale as, "a mid-Atlantic suburb, outside somewhere like Baltimore. They could have lived in Pennsylvania near the Main Line, though."^[5]

For comedic and illustrative purposes, the show's depiction of suburban American life was a deliberately exaggerated one.^[6] Lawndale was filled with archetypes, and Daria herself served as the series' observer. In The New York Times, the protagonist was described as "a blend of Dorothy Parker, Fran Lebowitz and Janeane Garofalo, wearing Carrie Donovan's glasses. Daria Morgendorffer, 16 and cursed with a functioning brain, has the misfortune to see high school, her family and her life for exactly what they are and the temerity to comment on it."^[7]

The series follows Daria through her high school years, ending with her graduation and acceptance into college. Daria and her best friend Jane Lane share their droll observations about their school and life. Though Daria initially has a crush on Jane's brother Trent, who plays guitar in a local rock band, her attraction remains unrequited, as she never reveals this to him.

The dynamics among the characters change during season four, when Jane begins a relationship with Tom Sloane, son of one of the town's richest families. Though Daria is hesitant to accept Tom at first, she and Tom find themselves becoming closer, culminating in a kiss in the season finale. The emotional and comedic turmoil among Jane, Tom, and Daria was the centerpiece of the TV movie Is It Fall Yet?, and fueled some of the subsequent final season's stories.

Characters

Daria Morgendorffer is the show's eponymous protagonist, who appears in most scenes. Her immediate family and best friend Jane Lane all appear in nearly every episode. A number of secondary characters round out the regular cast.

Production

Production of each half-hour episode took ten months to a year, from concept, story, voices, and design (at MTV's New York offices), to generating the animation (at a Korean company), to post-production.^[8]

No other characters from Beavis and Butt-head made an appearance on Daria. Glenn Eichler, in an interview conducted after the series' run, explained:

“

B&B were very strong characters, with a very specific type of humor and very loyal fans, and of course they were instantly identifiable. I felt that referencing them in Daria, while we were trying to establish the new characters and the different type of humor, ran the risk of setting up false expectations and disappointment in the viewers - which could lead to a negative reaction to the new show and its different tone. So we steered clear of B&B in the early going, and once the new show was established, there was really no need to hearken back to the old one.[9]

”

The series' only direct reference to the characters of Beavis and Butt-head was made in a promotional spot for the first episode. Daria states, in voice-over: "After leaving Highland, and those two, we moved to Lawndale."

In the TV movie Is It Fall Yet?, several celebrities provided guest voices. Talk show host Carson Daly played Quinn's summer tutor, female pop punk singer Bif Naked played Jane's art camp companion, and rock musician Dave Grohl played Jane's pretentious art camp host. Several songs by the band Foo Fighters (for which Grohl is frontman) were featured in the series.^[10]

After the show had become popular, rumors circulated stating that actress Janeane Garofalo provided the voice for Daria. Garofalo later stated that she was flattered to be considered "cool enough" to be the voice. Garofalo later hosted a half-hour "behind the scenes" MTV feature about the production of the show that aired during the fourth season.

Satirical elements

Though the show's satirical nature was omnipresent, Daria would rarely directly reference specific facets of pop culture, such as particular TV shows or bands (apart from the musical underscore, consisting of nothing but pop songs).

After each episode, credits would roll on one half of the screen, and the other would display series characters drawn out of character (termed by fans as "alter egos"). They ranged from Tiffany as a Pokémon, to Quinn's constant followers (Joey, Jeffy, and Jamie) as the three main characters from the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?, to Jane as the Statue of Liberty.

Nearly all the episode titles are puns of common phrases ("Pinch Sitter", on baseball's pinch hitter), TV shows or films ("It Happened One Nut", on Frank Capra's It Happened One Night), or other entities ("Jane's Addition", on the band Jane's Addiction).

The only TV program that Daria and Jane are shown to watch regularly is Sick, Sad World, the Daria team's spoof of sensationalist oddity programs. Usually, only a punning or gruesome commercial-break bumper for SSW is shown before Daria turns it off or other action ensues. In the episode "Just Add Water", Daria and Jane are shown trying to watch an all-night SSW marathon. Occasionally Daria zaps from one channel to another, which are showing common TV shows. For example, a clip that tweaks the series Charlie's Angels is shown in "Murder, She Snored", before a dream sequence begins (which itself satirizes various famous series).

Music and licensing

Daria's theme song is "You're Standing on My Neck", written and performed by all-female band Splendora.^[11] The band later created original themes for the two Daria TV movies, "Turn the Sun Down" (for Is It Fall Yet?) and "College Try (Gives Me Blisters)" (for Is It College Yet?), along with some background music.

The show itself had no original score. Though elements from Splendora's theme were used on occasion, Daria's incidental music was taken from pop music songs. Most of these were contemporary, inserted over exterior shots and some scenes, with rarely any story relevance or awareness from the characters. For example, one episode depicts characters dancing to Will Smith's "Gettin' Jiggy wit It" mere weeks after the song's release, whereas the sequence itself was designed and animated months earlier.

Some story points were built around specific songs, such as in "Legends of the Mall", where Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" became a major plot point for a fantasy sequence. The closing credits also featured a licensed song on all but a few occasions, the lyrics or concept of which often reflected some aspect of the preceding episode.

For the 1998 and 1999 VHS releases of some Daria episodes, incidental music was replaced, and "You're Standing on My Neck" was played over the closing credits. However, for the bonus episodes included on the DVD releases of the two TV movies, the music was removed almost entirely.

In the Complete Series DVD release, Eichler says in the notes "99 percent of the music has been changed, because the cost of licensing the many music bites we used would have made it impossible to release the collection (and for many years did)." He compared it to an episode of The Twilight Zone where the astronaut comes home, and his wife can't figure out what's different about him, "... until it dawns on her that instead of a cool song from 1997 playing ... it's some tune she's never heard. Yeah, it's just like that."

Networks

Daria was first shown on MTV in the United States. Reruns were carried from 2002 to 2006 on the teen-oriented cable channel The N.^[12] The show would return to The N (now known as TeenNick) in May 2010 to promote the Complete Series DVD release. Episodes were later shown dubbed in Spanish, without English subtitles, on MTV3 (MTV Tres). Episodes of Daria have been posted on MTV.com as of January 2010. On May 10, 2010, just weeks prior to the Daria series DVD release, MTV's sister network MTV2 began airing episodes of Daria during the late night and early morning hours, it previously aired the series in 2001 to 2002. Reruns were also shown on LOGO TV to promote the DVD release.

Many U.S. Daria fans have reported that The N's reruns were edited for content, often making remaining portions confusing, or removing much of the satire, subplots, and subtext.^[13] Some episodes touted as "The Lost Episodes" were added to The N's rotation in 2005, but several others were never shown. While the episode entitled "The F Word" was changed to just "Failure"

Outside the U.S., Daria has been shown on canal+ in France, on Five TV, MTV Two and The Music Factory in the UK; the ABC in Australia (formerly on MTV Australia as well); "HOT" and "YES" Cable network in Israel, YTV and Télétoon in Canada, RTÉ in Ireland, MTV Italia in Italy, MTV Korea in South Korea, MTV Russia and cartoon movie channel 2x2 in Russia.

Reception

By 1998, Daria was one of MTV's highest rated shows, with the network's manager Van Toffler viewing her as "a good spokesperson for MTV, intelligent but subversive". The investment company Ehrenkrantz King Nussbaum credited Daria and Beavis and Butt-head as helping to fuel MTV's growth in the 1990s to a general entertainment network and to encourage other networks to make cartoons like South Park & King of the Hill.^[14]

During her run on MTV, Daria was a notable enough character to be called in to narrate or "host" special events and shows, either with a real-life presenter or with Jane. She was part of the Cool Crap Auction in 1999, giving an overview of the goods for auction and talking "live" to the winner of one prize, answering machine messages recorded by her.^[15] Daria and Jane also hosted MTV's Top Ten Animated Videos Countdown,the segments of which are included on the 2010 DVD release; in this, she and Jane poked fun at MTV's cheap animation. At the end of the series run, she had an "interview" on the CBS Early Show with Jane Clayson.^[16] The characters are still known well enough that Jezebel magazine could run an open letter from "Quinn" as an article in May 2010.^[17]

Daria received a host of positive reviews during its run. John J. O'Connor of The New York Times wrote of the series' premiere, "With this new series, Daria triumphantly gets the last laugh" and "As far as MTV and Beavis and Butt-head are concerned, Daria is an indispensable blast of fresh air. I think I'm in love."^[18] Daria received a ratings share between 1 and 2 percent, about 1 to 2 million viewers. Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison, authors of Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture, said that although Daria was "not a huge hit by network standards", Daria became "a signature show" for MTV.^[19]

G.J. Donnelly of TV Guide, writing about the series' finale, lamented, "I already miss that monotone. I already miss those boots. ... Even at its most far-fetched, this animated film approaches the teenage experience much more realistically than shows like Dawson's Creek."^[20] On the same occasion, Emily Nussbaum wrote at Slate.com that "the show is biting the dust without ever getting the credit it deserved: for social satire, witty writing, and most of all, for a truly original main character". She particularly singled out for praise that all the characters were heading "to very different paths in life, based on their economic prospects", giving the show an ambigious end; "[the finale is] a bit of a classic: a sharply funny exploration of social class most teen films would render, well, cartoonish."^[21]

Among television critics and female reviewers, Daria was more popular than Beavis and Butthead. Stabile and Harrison said that the series was "intelligent and subversive — an unusual combination for prime time television."^[19] Some teenage viewers criticized what Stabile and Harrison referred to as "teen nihilism" present in programs such as Daria was a central factor in incidents such as the Columbine High School massacre. A critic complained that the series was "particularly insidious" because it offered "a corrupt role model" for teenagers. In contrast, Stabile and Harrison noted the active fandom for Daria as being "refreshingly sincere" and optimistic, stating that rather than encouraging nihilism "the show has become a way for dealing with nihilism" and the fandom enabled alienated youths to bond with each other and express creativity.^[19]

Stabile and Harrison noted that some commentators criticized the series for the "relatively static" animation style, with a "flat, unchanging nature". They added that a Daria critic attacked how the characters appear "exactly the same, down to their outfits and their hairstyles." Stabile and Harrison added that while some fans of Daria described the style as "realistic", they said that because the animation displayed little movement and "visually unchanging in a way that transformed them into iconic figures", the animation was in some aspects unrealistic. Stabile and Harrison argued that the "static, life-defying animation technique seemed" to contradict the concept that animation existed to "give life" to inanimate objects. Stabile and Harrison said that Daria had been "ironically drawn".^[22]

In a 2010 review of the DVD collection in Jezebel, Margaret Hartmann said that at as a teenager, "Daria and her best friend Jane Lane provided me with the sort of social guidance that allowed me to stay true to myself" and led to her keeping a childhood friend instead of dropping her to avoid "social suicide": "I'd picked up [Daria's] attitude that it's easier to survive high school with one fellow-loser who shares your misanthropic views than to spend four years trying to earn the admiration of girls whose main interests include proper eyeliner application". She cites Daria as "the most authentic TV nerd... she didn't look for her fellow students to accept her. She just wanted to be left alone", and said TV lacks similar character that "painfully geeky girls can relate to".^[23] DVD Talk's review referred to the show as "an indictment of everything MTV now embraces", and praised the character development and how the show still held up.^[24] Slate magazine's Reiham Salan said that the show had irritated him as a high school student when it first debuted, disliking that "the popular kids were defenseless", but praises that as well as Daria and Jane developing over time, the "popular" and adult characters also became deeper and more developed, and that the characters Mack and Jodie showed "not all popular kids are vapid goons".^[25]

Home video

Seven VHS videocassettes have been issued, all in PAL format, with the first two also in NTSC format. The first tape, titled simply Daria, includes the first three episodes of Season One followed by the five-minute animatic pilot. The second volume, Daria disenfranchised, continues with episodes 4 through 7.

The Daria TV movies Is It Fall Yet? and Is It College Yet? were the sole two authorized DVD releases until 2010. Each DVD also includes two episodes from the series, from seasons 4 and 5 respectively, with licensed music removed. The latter disc uses a second-showing MTV version that was shortened by approximately seven minutes, rather than the original cablecast version. It does, however, include a short clip of a Daria appearance on Beavis and Butt-head, accessed as a hidden Easter egg on the opening menu (by cycling among menu choices until the highlighting disappears).^[26]

These DVDs were ostensibly coded for Region 1 (North America), but found by purchasers to be region-free.^[27]

In July 2004, co-creator Glenn Eichler said of possible DVD releases, "There's no distributor and no release date, but what there is is very strong interest from MTV in putting Daria out, and steady activity toward making that a reality".^[28]

Bootlegs of the series could usually be found at movie conventions or San Diego Comic Con.

In July 2009, TVShowsOnDVD.com announced that a DVD release for the series is planned for 2010.^[29] In November 2009, more details emerged about the upcoming release regarding how it would be distributed and potential extras. It was also revealed that due to high licensing costs, much of the music on the show will be replaced by covers or sound-alike songs on the dvd release (although the studio has not released an official word about this topic).^[30] In January 2010, MTV released a teaser trailer on its website for Daria's 2010 release,^[31].

On May 11, 2010, Daria: The Complete Animated Series was released on DVD in North America. All 65 episodes and both TV movies are included in the set, although the edited version of Is It College Yet? was again used for this release. Extras featured on the set include the pilot episode, the music video "Freakin' Friends" by Mystik Spiral, "Daria Day" introductions as well as a top ten video countdown on MTV by Jane and Daria, cast and crew interviews, and (as a DVD-ROM feature) a script for an unproduced Mystik Spiral spin-off show.^[32] Unfortunately, most of the licensed music used in episodes has been replaced with other music. Unlike the Daria TV movies Is It Fall Yet? and Is It College Yet?, Daria: The Complete Animated Series is coded for Region 1, thus making it playable outside the US and Canada only on DVD players that are multi-region enabled and on televisions that are NTSC compatible. It is currently unknown whether the complete series will be officially released elsewhere in the world, if at all.

Books

• The Daria Database by Peggy Nicoll; MTV 1998 ISBN 0-671-02596-1
• The Daria Diaries by Anne Bernstein; MTV 1998 ISBN 0-671-01709-8

These books, by two of the most prolific writers of Daria episodes, have comedic and satirical material based upon the show as aired, but (apart from character guides in Diaries) are not reference works.

Games

• Daria's Sick Sad Life Planner; Pearson Software, 1999
• Daria's Inferno; Pearson Software, 2000, later distributed by Simon & Schuster Interactive

Related media

• MTV Video Music Awards 97 short animation featuring Daria (September 4, 1997) Transcript
• Daria called into MTV's 'Cool Crap Auction' Transcript
• Daria Day 98 marathon of Daria episodes on the date of the premiere of the second season (February 16, 1998), hosted by Daria and Jane. Transcript
• Daria Day 99 marathon of Daria episodes on February 15, 1999 for the premiere episode of the third season, hosted by Daria and Jane.
• Daria and Jane hosted a Daria episode marathon titled Sarcastathon 3000 for the premiere episode of the fifth season Transcript
• Daria and Jane hosted an episode of 'MTV's Top 10'. Commenting on the top 10 animated music videos Transcript
• Behind the Scenes at Daria hosted by Janeane Garofalo. More behind the scenes clips aired in Daria episodes following the special.
• MTV's Toonumentary detailed the history and details of MTV's animated shows. Transcript
• MTV New Year's Eve 2002 event featured a short appearance by Daria (December 31, 2001).Transcript.
• Daria was interviewed on CBS' The Early Show on January 21, 2002 Transcript
• Look Back in Annoyance was a half-hour retrospective of the series. Hosted by Daria and Jane. Transcript

References

External links

• Official website
• Daria at the Internet Movie Database
• Daria at the Big Cartoon Database
• Outpost Daria - in-depth fan site.

Daria Telemovies Is It Fall Yet? · Is It College Yet? Related articles Characters (Daria Morgendorffer) · Episodes · Beavis and Butt-head · Glenn Eichler · MTV