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.

In the Beginning

The image on the right is a reproduction of the original Planet Daria logo. This was reproduced using the much smaller link below. This link icon was found on an old, abandoned fan site. The logo was originally created by Rowena from a screen capture from “The Misery Chick”, also reproduced below.

The web mistress was Rowena Stubbs, who was a full time college student at this time.

The author first discovered Daria on MTV in January of 1998, during a blizzard which confined him to his home and the warming glow of his television. An animation marathon was in progress on MTV, and during this marathon the author saw his first full Daria episode, “The Road Worrier”. Fascinated by this unexpected presentation of intelligent content in such an unexpected place (and an uncanny parallel to a van trip the author took to see a band in his callow youth), the author proceeded to tape (using the primitive VHS technology of that era) the reminding shows of the first season, and prepared for “Daria Day” in February, which would unveil Season 2.

It was during this period the author discovered another use for his computer other than the trapping and subsequent disposal of email spam for porn sites and various enlargement devices. Between the screeching and hissing of his modem which occurred each time the phone company saw fit to drop his connection, he discovered first the smaller sites that featured regurgitated MTV content, and then links that took him finally to the fabled Planet Daria.

There he discovered the message board. First, the author used the screen name of Frank Black, but when “Quinn the Brain” aired in March of 1998, he changed is screen name to Milo Minderbinder, after realizing Daria was reading “Catch 22” on her bed in that episode. Hence he joined other fans of the show; Azalea, Splendora, SMC, Chris Smith (Kane), the Historian, Ms. Wild, Dr. Belch, and many others.

But the site kept moving, and the bookmarks on each fans browsers struggled to keep up. Rowena originally used several of the free services, starting with freemall.com, earthlink.net and welcome.to, and then moving to opni.com and finally geocites.com. Planet Daria was a victim of its own success. Free hosting in those bygone days meant you got maybe 5 or 10 megabytes of hard drive on the host server, and paid dearly for any overage. The backend machines of that time were large, slow beasts with maybe 10 to 20 gigabytes total available storage. If you wanted more than that, you had to pay, or hire Johnny Mnemonic.

As for the lack of artifacts from these earlier sites, it should be remembered that in these pioneering days, due to the lack of space overall, leaving a site meant all files were deleted. Or, where the service didn’t bother removing the old files, an inevitable disk crash on the site would.

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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Planet Daria

Contents

Background

In the Beginning

Contents

External Links