Daria Morgendorffer
Daria Morgendorffer is a fictional character and the title character of the American adult animated series Daria. She is voiced by Tracy Grandstaff. Daria was initially designed and created by Beavis and Butt-Head staff writer David Felton as a supporting character, serving as an intelligent foil to Beavis and Butt-Head.
MTV, which aired Beavis and Butt-Head, eventually sought to make an animated show catered more to female viewers; Glenn Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn co-developed Daria. Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butt-Head, is officially credited as Daria's creator and designer.
The character received a positive response, being ranked at No. 41 on the TV Guide list of the "Top 50 Greatest Cartoon Characters of All Time" and No. 68 on AOL's list of the "100 Most Memorable Female TV Characters".
Conception and development
created the Daria character on advice of the network. MTV senior vice president and creative director Abby Terkuhle explained that when Beavis and Butt-Head "became successful, we... created Daria's character because we wanted a smart female who could serve as the foil." Terkuhle said that he added Daria "to put Beavis and Butt-Head in their place". Judge says that Daria was named for a girl he knew in school who, like the character, was saddled with the nickname "Diarrhea". Glenn Eichler, who created the Daria spin-off – sometimes incorrectly stated to be the character's creator as well – was, along with Peggy Nicoll, one of the main writers of the series; other writers were Neena Beber, Anne D. Bernstein, Rachelle Romberg, Rachel Lipman, and Sam Johnson.In ''Beavis and Butt-Head''
In Daria's first incarnation as a recurring character on Beavis and Butt-Head, she formed an intelligent female foil to the two main characters. She went through three different outfits, had a stockier figure, and initially was a more expressive character; her iconic monotone voice developed over time. While she later became more sardonic, she showed early on that she could hold her own against the two and could react quickly to their antics.In her debut episode, "Scientific Stuff", she was forced to do a science class presentation with Beavis and Butt-Head. At first, Daria is horrified by this and voiced out her complaints to Mrs. Dickie against having to work with the pair due to their history of stupidity and lack of common sense. She later turned it to her advantage by using them as the presentation's experiment. She had a minor role in her next two appearances, in "Babes R Us" and "Sign Here". In "Sign Here" she answered questions from David Van Driessen on furriers and their treatment of animals. In later appearances, she alternated between being irritated by their antics and finding their stupidity to be amusing: in "Sprout", she specifically came over to watch them fail at planting seeds, and in "Walkathon" she got them to unwittingly pledge $100 apiece on a charity walkathon. In "Sporting Goods" she gave three eye-popping gasps while Beavis and Butt-Head wear eye patches as athletic supporters, which is a dramatic contrast to her monotonous behavior in the later series. She lacked the passionate hatred for them that Principal McVicker and Coach Buzzcut had and was one of the very few characters that would willingly seek them out, but did not really believe there is any hope for them either, as Van Driessen had. On multiple occasions, she took it upon herself to explain simple concepts to them, such as informing them in "U.S. History" what graduation was and in "Sprout" that you put seeds in the ground.
In a Christmas special, it is stated that Butt-Head had been responsible for giving her a negative outlook on boys. Aside from that, she was one of the few characters that the duo never managed to drive crazy as they had with many other students and teachers. Butt-Head sometimes treated her with some degree of respect, following her advice in "Sprout" and chuckling "Daria's cool!" after she asked Bill Clinton if "you were just jerking us around" on a campaign promise.
John J. O'Connor of The New York Times describes Daria "as sharp as B. & B. are dimwitted". John Allemang of The Globe and Mail described Daria in Beavis and Butt-Head "the prematurely wise girl who could be counted on to put their idiocy in perspective." Beavis and Butt-Head often call her "Diarrhea".
In the final episode of season 7, when the boys were believed dead, Daria expressed the sentiments that "I guess it's sad they're dead", but they did not have very bright futures to look forward to.
Daria appeared frequently in the Marvel Comics adaptation of the TV show, and also got to appear on the cover of one issue and "answer" the fan mail in two others. In Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, she appears once throughout the film with a group of students, but does not have any dialogue.
Daria's own show never mentioned Beavis and Butt-Head and named Highland only once at the beginning of the first episode of season one, carried over from the original and unbroadcast pilot. Despite this, it was frequently noted in media articles about the show that it was a spin-off from Beavis and Butt-Head. During a 1998 MTV music video countdown of the "Top 10 Animated Videos", in which Daria and Jane were the presenters, this was joked at when the Red Hot Chili Peppers's cover of "Love Rollercoaster" made for the movie Beavis and Butt-Head Do America clocked in at #2; Jane quips that "This one features two guys from Daria's past! Do the names "Beavis" and "Butt-Head" ring a bell?", to which Daria calls her a "ding-dork" afterwards. In an "interview" on CBS Early Show on January 21, 2002, Daria was asked by Jane Clayson if she kept in touch with Beavis and Butt-Head; she responded "I'd like to, but first they'd have to figure out that when the telephone makes that funny sound, you're supposed to pick it up and say hello".
As revealed in a Rolling Stone interview with Mike Judge, Daria would not return to the new episodes of Beavis and Butt-Head in 2011, but she was referenced in "Drones" during a music video when Beavis assumed she had committed suicide. However, Butt-Head incredulously tells his friend "What are you talking about, Beavis? Daria didn't die, she just moved away".
Daria made a brief, silent cameo in the 2022 Paramount+ film Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe, during Beavis and Butt-Head's sentencing, upset with the fact that the boys got off scot-free with their crime.
In the season finale episode of season 10, "Abduction", Daria's Smart counterpart, known as "Smart Daria", appears as one of the supreme leaders who sentences Smart Butt-Head and Smart Beavis back to earth to try to complete a mission or face the death sentence. Smart Daria also appears in the season finale of season 11, "The Discoverers".
In ''Daria''
In the series Daria, which followed Beavis and Butt-Head, Daria remains bespectacled and plain. She is an unfashionably dressed, highly intellectual, entirely pessimistic about life altogether, cynical, and sarcastic teenage girl who is portrayed as an icon of sanity in an insane household in an equally insane upper middle class suburb. She resides with her vacuous, fashion-obsessed younger sister Quinn and career-obsessed parents Helen and Jake. Their family name, "Morgendorffer", indicates that her father's family originally hails from Germanic roots. John Allemang of The Globe and Mail said that Daria is "both the disappointment of her overachieving parents and an embarrassment to her boy-crazy sister Quinn". She had moved to a new school, having transferred from the one in Beavis and Butt-Head. Glenn Eichler said, in relation to Daria the series, of which he was a co-creator, "I like to think that I've helped her come out of her shell."David L. Coddon of the San Diego Union-Tribune described Daria as "the anti-cheerleader, the un-social climber, the jaundiced eye in a cartoon world of too much makeup and superficial crayon colors". Coddon added that Daria "may look like a misfit, but the catch is that Daria's the only character on the show who 'gets it'. It's everyone else who's a misfit." Daria states in the first episode that she does not have low self-esteem: she has low esteem for everybody else. Anita Gates of The New York Times said "The secret of Daria's popularity may be our collective alienation." Gates says "her tastes are a little dark." As an example, Gates used the fact that she reads "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg at a reading to the elderly program.
Eichler said, "Apparently everyone, with the exception of a very few people who were hit on the head when they were very young, felt like they were outsiders. You either identify with her as an outsider or you sort of envy her ability to navigate her life as an outsider and stay sane." John J. O'Connor, a television critic for The New York Times, said "In short, Daria is the perfect anti-Barbie Doll. Merchants of fashion and cosmetics are beneath her contempt. Her refusal to be Miss Goody Consumer borders on the truly subversive." He concludes that Daria "is every glorious misfit I ever knew".
Allemang said that in Daria, Daria "seems more tortured and neurotic, if only because it's more clear that the airheads have won". Daria often talks to herself. Allemang adds "in a perky-teen world with its twisted values, soliloquies are the best hope of intelligent conversation." In addition he said "There's nothing intrinsically wrong with Daria, just because she can't or won't hang out with the cool kids." John J. O'Connor of The New York Times said that Daria has "a withering eye" towards her classmates. Emily Nussbaum for Slate would praise the show both for having a character that many disaffected teenagers could relate to and for showing "the flipside of her principled withdrawal from the world: her crippling terror of rejection, a streak of ugly self-righteousness".
Daria likes to watch the fictitious television show Sick, Sad World. Gates added that "Daria is the kind of girl who reads Heart of Darkness and Edgar Allan Poe's 'Telltale Heart' in class."