Planet Daria

Planet Daria, run by Rowena Stubbs, was among the first Daria websites and possibly the first comprehensive fan site.

Background

Reproduction of the orignal site logo

In his famous speech made on May 9, 1961, Newton N. Minow of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) called the media of television a “vast wasteland”. This media scarcely only a dozen or so years old as of this date of this speech, but it was already stale. The human creativity in this landscape had already evaporated away from the hot, arid winds of endless game shows and westerns. From that time forward, the occasional moistening dew from an Alfred Hitchcock or a Rod Sterling would swiftly be baked out of the ether by the searing excesses of cop shows, sitcoms, docu-dramas and a seemingly endless stream of commercials.

Cable television arrived in the late ‘70’s, and the hopes that many more channels would provide more diverse and interesting entertainment were dashed as cable merely expanded the borders of the wasteland. MTV arrived with the advent of cable, with the fresh new format of music videos, but by the end of the 1980’s these were as dry, stale and commercialized as the 128 channels of crap around them. Beginning in the ‘90’s, the format of MTV slowly changed from music videos to vapid reality programming and empty “pop” news programs. In the ever expanding landscape of the wasteland, MTV was becoming as inimical to intelligent life as Death Valley.

Yet, occasionally in the wasteland, small rivers of creativity would spontaneously form and flow. MTV created an animation division, and the early part of the ‘90’s, Bevis and Butthead make their debut. Not particularly highbrow entertainment, but by mocking the very wasteland that created them, proved to be humorous and entertaining. Soon other animation followed this success. Then, in 1997, an interesting spin-off from Bevis and Butthead series arrived.

During this time, an adjacent landscape appeared, and this new media already in danger of becoming a wasteland in its own right. This was the commercial Internet, and with it came in 1993 the World Wide Web. In less than five years, this new media was already on its way to becoming a desert of commercial websites, endless ads, spam and porn. But from all this, a digital stream emerged, and crossed over into the plain of its much older and more analog neighbor.

It was at the confluence of MTV animation and the new digital media that something truly remarkable happened. Websites began to spawn and multiply, starting first with a corporate site from MTV, but then also from the many fans of the new series. Many fans began building their binary web nests on newly available “free” hosting services. Dozens, no, hundreds of fan sites appeared, but for the most part these small creatures merely took material from the MTV site, and made it their own. Each competed for eyeballs, for “hits”, the life giving force of the Internet. Many preformed mating dances using newly available JavaScript, using flashing screens and jiggling banners in an attempt to attract, to mate and unite with other fans. But in the end, all the java widgets and animated .gifs were an attempt to mask the sad fact that most of these sites contained little to no real flesh, no bulk, and no real original content.

But out of this fertile mud arose giants. These sites grew with original content and as they received more and more “hits” from other fans, these fans massed together to provide even more content and grew the core site even more. Hence, the first “megasites” evolved, and soon these gentle giants became the undisputed masters of their digital domain. Between the time the Bevis and Butthead spinoff, “Daria”, first aired on March 3, 1997 and the airing of the second season, three “mega sites” dominated this digital delta. These were Sick, Sad World, alt.lawndale.com, and Planet Daria, whose web mistress name was Rowena Stubbs.

All three sites died in a sudden mass extinction in second half of 1998. Sick, Sad World, hosted by Wrath and alt.lawndale.com, hosted by Katherine Goodman have remained intact, un-updated, and yet preserved, as if in amber, in their 1998 state. But Planet Daria has completely vanished, leaving behind only tiny fragments of long dead links. Other giants rose as these behemoths came crashing down. Lawndale Commons, hosted by Michelle Klein-Hass and Outpost Daria, hosted by Martin J. Pollard absorbed the fan base of these sites, and Outpost Daria recovered most of the art, stories and transcripts of the original Planet Daria and alt.lawdale.com sites.

This alone is all that remains of Planet Daria as of the date of this writing.

Contents

Outpost Daria inherited a lot of Planet Daria's content. The archives of Outpost Daria in late 1998 reveal that Planet Daria contained (at least):

• A transcript of MTV's Daria Day Marathon (1998)
• A transcript of MTV's "Top 10 Animated Videos Countdown"
• Song lists for Seasons One and Two
• Oops! Lists (through 1998)
• Quinn's "Academic Imprisonment" essay and other information related to the "Quinn the Brain" episode.
• Fanfiction

It is also known that Outpost Daria has the Planet Daria transcripts from all of the Seasons One and Two episodes. However, the transcripts were done without the aid of closed-captioning and contain some glaring errors. For instance, dialogue is left out of "The Daria Hunter" transcript that reveals that Anthony DeMartino went to military school.

External Links

• A Question of Gratitude, an essay by Michelle Klein-Hass

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