The Wild Blog in the West

Normally I don't review College Humor 's brilliant trailers, but since I have a connection to Daria , I couldn't resist. The two-minute trailer features a live-action "movie" where Daria has come home for her 10-year high school reunion.  Suddenly she's dealing with the same stupidity... just 10 years older. Audrey Plaza does a nice job capturing Daria's voice and mannerisms.  The other stuff is pretty spot-on, too.  Some  Daria fans have complained about details that the trailer gets wrong, such as Daria being the valedictorian instead of Jodie.  To me, that misses the point.  The trailer isn't supposed to be a 100% accurate update of the cartoon: it is guessing what a Hollywood movie of the cartoon would look like. A Hollywood movie could have multiple writers, producers, and a director not familiar with the show.  That means details get missed.  The Daria the Movie fanfic spoof from years ago showed the worst-case scenario.  If anything

It struck me that the title could be construed to suggest that Daria itself was MTV's one great miss.  On the contrary, Daria was the best series to come out of MTV.  I would even venture to say that its very existence almost makes up for MTV's other drek.  Almost. So after I built up the show so well in the last post, what was it that was Daria 's great miss?  Well, for a show that managed to create such complex characters and a high schooler who was unique, yet to whom we could all relate, Daria never really seemed to get high school. It is far from the only show to miss in that respect.   Saved By the Bell and Beverly Hills 90210 divided the school into Popular Kids and Everyone Else.  Occasionally an unknown character might pop up to "school" the Popular Kids about the Specialness of other students, but that person usually vanished by the next episode.   Buffy acknowledged the unpopular kids, to the extent that they really were unpopular, but the rest of t

Since I want this blog to look at media as well as general social issues, it only makes sense that I start with the show that was my passion for the good part of a decade: MTV's Daria . From the left: Jake, Helen, Quinn, Daria, and Jane Many are probably already familiar with the show, since  Daria was finally released on DVD in May 2010.  In case you are not, though, here is a brief description.   Daria was a half-hour animated series that ran from 1997 to 2002, for a total of 65 episodes and two full-length TV movies.  It was a spinoff of Beavis and Butt-head , another MTV animated show that ran from 1993 to 1997.  The character of Daria was originally created because someone at MTV thought that Beavis and Butt-head could use a smart female character as a foil for the "protagonists."  Around 1995, MTV executives approached Beavis and Butt-head  writer Glenn Eichler with the idea of creating a spinoff show for Daria.  That was when MTV executives had a glimmer of