Hacker Cinema
Daria
1997 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Glenn Eichler, Susie Lewis
After moving to a new town with her stressed-out parents and relentlessly popular little sister, Daria uses her acerbic wit and keen powers of observation to contend with the mind-numbingly ridiculous world of Lawndale High.
6 positive5 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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15 comments on Hacker News
I don't know about the framing, won't speculate on causes, but the phenomenon being described is real. I have no idea how far it goes back, at least to Woody Guthrie if we're just describing people who history and artistic output I'm personally aware of, but I'm sure more than that. What the author is writing about specifically began with baby boomer countercultures of the 60s rejecting commercialism in any form. Part of that ethos for many would have also rejected any movie starring Ronald Reagan or playing sports (other than maybe running).
But everything can be co-opted. When whatever real world Don Draper managed to use hippieism to sell Coca Cola in 1971, that began the discrediting of this first wave, and punk eventually emerged as a second wave. The rockers versus disco shenanigans may have included punk, but punk as its own distinct culture rejected larger scale rock and roll just as much. As a musical movement, it was a rejection of Kiss and Aerosmith more than Donna Summer.
But then punk, too, stayed underground in the hardcore movement the cited Beastie Boys were a part of in the 80s, but also influenced mainstream rock, and grunge emerged as a rejection of that, the excesses of hair metal, glam, and even something like Guns n Roses.
Then grunge softened into "alternative rock" and Nirvana became Goo Goo Dolls. The author's point is where is the reaction to that? It feels like grunge was the last true anti-consumerism rejection of musicians selling out, softening their sound to become more popular. I've been watching Daria for the first time in 30 years the past few weeks, which I watched originally but barely remembered, and it hits hard these days. It explores this exact dynamic quite well. Daria's parents are middle-aged ex-hippies questioning themselves for becoming an attorney and a consultant. Daria herself won't wear makeup and worries about replacing her glasses with contacts because it will make her more attractive and thus less authentic. She gets mad at Jane for joining the track team because of how bought-in she to the notion that a jock of any kind is already selling their soul whether they have success or not. She isn't mad at being unpopular. She wants to be unpopular. That was a very real ethos of the 90s I remember experiencing quite starkly myself. Popularity as inherently bad, aligning your incentives as a person less to being true to yourself and more to being what others want you to be.
Do teens of the 20s still experience anything like that? You'd think it would be universal, but if there's any musical movements associated with it, I'm not aware of them. There's the revival of socialism and distrust of capitalism, eat the rich, but as I think the author is getting at, Che and Castro probably wouldn't have spared Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. The remaining question for me is whether this is still true in actual youth culture. I think the author and myself are probably dating each other here. Even Taylor Swift is nearly 40. Her concerts are selling for so much because her fans are in their 30s and actually have money. I'm not sure this is what actual kids and teenagers are listening to and whatever their sentiments about culture and consumerism may be, us adults probably don't even know. It's the nature of underground movements that most of us don't learn about them until they go mainstream.
That's awful. Stuff like this is why I mourn the loss of MTV and VH1; they would actually license artists' music in their Behind the Music documentary episodes, I discovered a lot of artists that way.
The Beavis & Butthead and Daria shows in the '90s also used a lot of licensed music. When the DVD versions arrived in the mid-2000s, the music was removed and replaced by stock instrumentals; I'm not sure the torrents of the original versions are even being seeded anymore.
A couple I can remember off the top of my head, since I can't check my server right now. Scrubs with original music, since they didn't have the license for the original songs for streaming (or the DVDs, I can't remember). Daria with the original music for the same reason. I can't think of any fan visual remasters of tv shows though.
There are many layers to "being familiar with anglo culture"... being able to understand technical documentation to a degree won't cut it in many cases.
I went through several stages of learning retroactively (i.e. not appropriate to my age) through dating or having otherwise good relationships with someone from the US. So, for example, I've learned about TV shows like Daria or Dr. Who many years after they came out. (And yes, I've learned about Dr. Who from an American friend, and before that I didn't know there's a thing for more educated Americans where they think that Brits are more... refined, not sure if that's the right word).
I'm married to someone born in the US, so, through her and the need of dealing with the kid who grows up primarily speaking English I've learned nursery rhymes, lullabies and a bunch of kids folklore that I would've never come in touch with in my line of work.
More than that, you can perfectly well live in another country and never really know the side of life of the locals if you are never invited to visit, or don't develop very good relationships with the locals. You might never know what home-cooked food looks like because you'd only have access to store-bought or restaurant meals. (Eg. I didn't know that mac-and-cheese was such a common food in the US until I was invited to visit someone in an informal setting). And there's plenty more of it. It'd take a book to try to enumerate all of these.
This both affects the less formal communication one may have with their peers as well as contributes to cultural mixups especially when it comes to customer-facing interfaces.
A really interesting example of this is the MTV animated series Daria (1997-2002). The show would play licensed music and the pop/alternative hits of the day, making it feel very 'of its time' -- this was when MTV was at the height of its cultural relevance.
Then years after the show went off the air, they released DVD versions that stripped out every single song and replaced it with random royalty-free music. It really hurt the episodes.
Maybe they replaced the music? That's what they did in order to be able to release the series Daria on DVD. Included in the package was an apology letter explaining why they had to replace all the music.
They might have also secured some of the rights and just dropped the episodes containing songs where they couldn't. That's what Disney did when they put The Muppet Show on Disney+. A few episodes are missing because even with Disney's money they couldn't get the rights to all the songs.
Yeah this happened with Daria. MTV had the broadcast rights to a whole bunch of music, and was able to use it all throughout the run of Daria, but when they released the VHS tapes of the movies and the DVDs of the series, all the licensed music was replaced with similar but legally distinct music, which really makes the show feel weird. This version was used for the streaming release as well.
There was a small movement a few years back that digitally removed the royalty free music and re-added the original music, but that means that depending on how loud the royalty free music was, the audio quality of the characters' dialogue can get really bad. I still liked it better than the royalty free version though, because Daria really is a time capsule into the late 90s and without the original music it loses a lot of that power.
As far as I've been able to find, there's no way to watch the original episodes. If anyone happened to tape every episode, they didn't upload them anywhere. I'd kill for an official release with the original audio.
> I don’t understand why people get their panties in a twist over the original music being cut out of the DVDs.
I'm guessing that's because you didn't watch the show while it was airing. The music in Daria originally came from what was new and popular at the time episodes aired. The show's soundtrack was essentially the same as the viewer's day to day soundtrack. You could hear a new song on MTV, maybe spending hours watching MTV just waiting for the song to come back on, and then suddenly the song you've been listening to and listening for all week would turn up in an episode. It wasn't that the songs they used were directly relevant to the story in the episode, rather that the songs were directly relevant to the lives of the viewers. It was something that didn't (and really couldn't) happen anywhere else but because MTV had the access to the music they could pull it off.
Also, if you've mostly only seen the DVDs with generic music you might not realize how good the original soundtrack was. Many many songs used in the show are simply amazing. If you were an avid MTV watcher at the time, watching the show years later with the original soundtrack would bring back many old favorites. You can still find playlists of the original soundtrack at least so if you haven't had the pleasure I'd recommend checking them out.
I was late 20's in the Daria time frame. Yet, as I noted in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28011399, I liked that enough that years later I torrented all the episodes and binge-watched a good bunch of it. The concept and the characters are good. It's an "artifact of cultural significance".
I like Daria; I have all the episodes somewhere on some hard drive thanks to Bittorrent.
Regarding Beavis and Butt-Head, I made a script in the early 1990's that produced randomized B&B laughter, using samples.
hhehhh hehh huh .. hhe eheh ...
I love daria.
I didn’t really watch it on MTV - just an episode here and there, but ended up sitting through all the DVD’s one summer.
It’s a really great show, and I don’t understand why people get their panties in a twist over the original music being cut out of the DVDs. It was never a part of the story (except for the R:E:M song, but I think they kept it in), which together with its characters can more than stand on their own.
Same thing happened bringing Daria to DVD. The soundtrack was a big part of the show and MTV had access to whatever music they wanted so regardless of how long it took to write/animate an episode when the show aired you might hear a song that had just been released. Trying to secure the rights to all those songs decades later was impossible so they replaced nearly all of it with generic music. It's just not the same. The creators know it, and the DVD actually shipped with an explanation and apology.
This question reminds me of an interesting exchange in an episode of Daria:
Ashley-Amber - How do you think they make glitter?
Brittany - Hmm. I don't think we've learned that yet in science.
Salesman - Can I help you, ladies?
Ashley-Amber - Yes. How do they make glitter?
Salesman - Why, they capture a moonbeam and crumble it up into tiny little specks of magic.
Ashley-Amber (to Brittany) - Then we can save a bunch of money by doing it ourselves.
There was an episode of the show Daria that explored this phenomenon.
So now broadcast TV should be our benchmark for quality customer experiences? Yeah, "the horror," I didn't switch to streaming to get the exact same problems.
I'm a long time Hulu subscriber, and when I signed up the amount of advertising in a given program was MUCH more reasonable and there were more shows available. The quality of service has actively degraded over time since I became a customer, and their solution was to offer a more expensive option that does not actually remove ads, since plenty of shows still have them. Frankly, I feel like I am entitled to some free TV at this point, for the sheer volume of advertising Hulu has gradually warmed me into thinking is reasonable to be exposed to in a 20 minute program. It shouldn't take 40 minutes to get through an episode of Daria.
That gets to a point I left out of my original post - I really wouldn't mind spending a couple more bucks if I could still watch the shows I originally signed up for, but Hulu is now removing most of the old programming I like (Daria, Chapelle's Show, etc). Their original programming is clearly not as good as they seem to think it is and three melodramatic shows about weird psychics doesn't make up for the programming I actually want to watch, which is now literally only available on DVD or on Kodi. Hollywood doesn't exist to entertain me at no cost but there's literally nothing for me to "just pay for."