That's Daria!

That’s Daria!

Feedback (good, bad, indifferent, just want to bother me, whatever) is appreciated. Please write to: theangstguy@yahoo.com

Synopsis: What if “Daria” returned to the airwaves… as an offbeat teen sitcom created in the most way-out-there Hollywood style?

Author's Notes: Ajar took charge of the first round of the 2010 March Madness write-off, and this story was one response to the challenge he offered: write something, from a scene to an entire episode, involving the Daria cast in the style of an average teen sitcom.

Acknowledgements: Ajar, you da MAN! J

Monday, January 25, 2010, 06:34:42 AM

From: slikrick-freelance@boggle.com

To: carson.kitt@programming.mtv.com

Re: Proposal for “THAT’S DARIA!” MTV teen sitcom

Carson,

Jeez, give me a little time next time, okay? I got it done over the weekend, no thanks to you, the whole first episode for the suits this afternoon. I got a good feeling about this revamp and relaunch of the cartoon (sorry, “animated”) series. This one’s gonna work. It’s got legs like Lady Gaga, no shit. Brace yourself, C-man.

TEN WORDS: “Patty Duke” meets “Ugly Betty” meets “Hannah Montana,” without “Daria.” That’s right: NO DARIA. Face facts: the nineties are over. Shitcan the loser attitude and whiny crap in the original. We deep-six Daria, but listen: we keep her cute sister Quinn. Here’s the twist: Quinn plays both herself and Daria! It’s all explained in the script, when she takes that IQ test on her first day at Lawndale High and comes out a genius when she accidentally guesses all the right answers. She’s not really a genius, but she might be—get it? Leave it open. She won’t cop to the test, ‘cause who wants to be a brain, right? So she says it was her twin sister Daria who took the test. She doesn’t have a sister, but she makes one up. Quinn and Daria, like Superman and whoever was the guy he was pretending to be, the only difference being the glasses. Quinn puts on glasses to look smart (“Daria”) and takes them off to look normal! It’s like a homage! Outrageous!

There’s more: Tom Sloane—he’s there at the start, at Lawndale High, instead of popping in halfway through the series at another school. Cool ultra-rich kid, love interest Numero Uno for Quinn. Smart guy, drives a super sports car, going to be big in business, likes smart girls, wants a savvy girlfriend for a future business partner. He likes “Daria,” so Quinn turns into “Daria” for him! It’s a natural!

Trent—keep him & clean him up, but shoot the rest of the band in the head and dump them in a landfill. We’ve got studio people to play them (limited screen time). The new Mystic Spiral is up and coming, gonna be big but still paying its dues. (Think of MS like this: The Monkees meet Good Charlotte in the 2010s!) We use tracks from the band (studio) as musical background (with promotional tie-ins, see Marketing notes). Trent is Quinn’s love interest Numero Other Uno.

You see where this is going? Quinn’s got her heart torn between two hotties! Women will suck it right up. We nail the demographic. Quinn tries out for the Spiral and gets to be the lead singer (at the end of episode one, attached), but she doesn’t want anyone to know that’s her on the stage, so she gets a third personality: Monique! (Legal says that Mo’Neek can be trademarked, so let’s go with that.)

You see what’s happening here? We’re one step ahead of “Hannah Montana”! Three personalities! When Quinn wants to look like she’s smart (for a teacher, not for the other kids, except Tom), she puts on glasses and she’s Daria; when she wants to sing or be with Trent, she puts on glitter and dyes her hair and she’s Mo’Neek; when she wants to be herself, she has to juggle all this and still be fresh and cute—not too smart, not too superstar, just herself: Quinn Labelle (shitcanned that uber M-name, too).

Now, Quinn doesn’t have a free ride, okay? Her arch-enemy is Sandi Darcness (like Darkness, get it?), who’s the top alpha b-word of Lawndale High School. No one does anything without Sandi’s okay. Everyone at Lawndale High is under Queen Sandi’s thumb, like in 1984—everyone but Quinn (and “Daria” and “Mo’Neek”), who’s like the freedom fighting trio, except—you getting this?—it’s all just Quinn! Except that in the second half of the first episode (attached) we find out Quinn has two powerful allies. Not Tom and Trent, though, they’re seniors and above all that high-school political bullshit even though they’re secretly sweet on her.

First, there’s Stacy, who’s Queen Sandi’s personal lackey except she’s secretly a freedom fighter like Quinn. Stacy’s got this special power that if she pulls on both her pigtails at once three times, she can see into the future! It’s awesome. She’s the only one at Lawndale High who knows Quinn’s secret identities. Tom and Trent suspect the truth, but they don’t know for sure. Stacy is Robin to Quinn’s Batman. She knows all of Queen Sandi’s evil plans to make Quinn unpopular so she can rule Lawndale High forever—except there’s one thing even Stacy doesn’t know: Sandi is actually DeathStarr, the arch-enemy of Mo’Neek, the local rockstar teen who’s trying to take Tom and Trent for herself! DeathStarr is Rita Repulsa to Quinn’s Power Rangers. DeathStarr will stop at nothing to see Mo’Neek and the other freedom fighters destroyed, or at least made unpopular (same thing).

And there’s Ted. Ted’s this geeky smart kid who has a crush on “Daria” and is always there to give her advice so “Daria” looks smart, even if Quinn isn’t. Ted is Q to Quinn’s James Bond. He supplies “Daria” with a secret utility belt full of stuff like truth gas (to make Queen Sandi slip up) and speed juice (to make “Daria” super-fast so she can write out a term paper in 30 seconds if she forgot to do it earlier, or if Queen Sandi stole Quinn’s homework to make Quinn look bad in class). Maybe in a later episode we can have Ted give Quinn (“Daria”) a giant invisible robot or a flying car or something.

Some of the teachers at Lawndale High are on Quinn’s side in the war against Queen Sandi, but some of them are Sandi’s evil pawns, like Principal Lee (not Oriental now, but really old and deaf, for comic relief). Sandi’s got hypnotic powers so if anyone looks into her eyes for too long, they become like her willing slave. We get into more about this in later episodes, but it’s hinted at in the showdown scene in the first episode (attached) in which Quinn (as “Daria”) gives a rousing speech to the whole school in support of Be Kind to Minorities Day. (We can change this if the suits don’t like minorities; maybe Be Kind to Cheerleaders Day or something.) Queen Sandi tries to hypnotize “Daria” to make it Do Anything for Sandi Day, but “Daria” is using special contact lenses that Ted made for her to block the evil eye, after Stacy warned her about Queen Sandi’s plot. Ted wants to give “Daria” a hug when they win, but he’s too shy and conflicted. (Ted is Will to Quinn’s Grace, if you get my drift.) Tom tells “Daria” he’s never seen anyone stand up to Sandi like she has, and he gives her this smile that makes Quinn (“Daria”) blush and weak in the knees. He lets her know he wants to go out with her because he respects her for who she is on the inside, not because she’s a drop-dead gorgeous sexy redhead (which she is).

And that night, when Mystic Spiral and “Mo’Neek” give a free concert in Lawndale for Be Kind to Minorities Day so the minorities can have their own club or something, Trent tells “Mo’Neek” that she’s the coolest high schooler he’s ever known. She blushes right down to her feet! And he wants to go out with her, too! She’s got three guys (two guys, really, since Ted doesn’t count) after her, she’s put Queen Sandi on notice that her wicked days are numbered. One day, Lawndale High will again be free! We close on “Mo’Neek” leading the school’s fight song with Tom on her left and Trent on her right, and the American flag waving behind them as fireworks go off.

Now, you tell me THAT doesn’t have legs! Good luck with the pitch. Call me when the suits make us billionaires. I got bills up to my chin here.

Rick

====================================

Monday, February 1, 2010, 06:57:38 AM

From: slikrick-freelance@boggle.com

To: carson.kitt@programming.mtv.com

Re: Re: Proposal for “THAT’S DARIA!” MTV teen sitcom

Carson,

What the F! happened, dude? Did they even READ the script? Who cares what happened to Jane Lane? Who needs her? This show is about DARIA! Jane got thrown in the river in cement shoes with the real Daria (not “Daria,” meaning Quinn). This is pure bullshit. That script was relevant! It was platinum! And yes, I already knew the VP for Finance is black. That’s why I put in that stuff about being kind to minorities. What’s all this bullshit he wrote about the script being patronizing? I never patroned anything!

Okay, okay, that’s water over the bridge, whatever. I can’t believe the suits couldn’t envision that story for the win it was. Like I know there isn’t a real Daria in the stupid script, right? Who cares what the show’s called. Jeez, call it “Lawndale Freedom Fighters” or some crap like that, who cares. And the suits have a lot of nerve for what they said about the proposal being too unrealistic and complicated. Hell, teenagers are the least realistic people on Earth! Plus, nothing’s too complicated for teenagers. They can make anything electronic work. They multitask all the time. It’s all over the place in Time and Newsweek. Doesn’t anyone keep up with current events anymore?

Right, right, right, forget it. I spent all f-ing weekend reworking the concept, even though the first one was infinity to the infinite power, times cubed, but let’s move on. This one’s different. This one’s tight. This one hits all the buttons. The suits want a real Daria, fine, we give ‘em a real Daria… only this one is a robot in a high school for vampires, and her boyfriend is an alien black guy!

TEN WORDS: “Small Wonder” meets “Twilight” meets “Blade” meets “BfAP” meets “Jungle Fever.” (BfAP is “Brother from Another Planet” but shorter so it makes ten words.) This script is so close to the edge, it cuts itself if it even thinks of shaving. You know what I mean. Daria is actually D.A.R.I.A. (cribbed the idea off a fanfiction site on the Internet somewhere, didn’t see a copyright), a teenage robot. She’s a test model made by this secret robot company working for the military. She’s got a special robot brain, one of those AI things, only she’s been programmed to be like a human, only she’s not. But—here’s the kicker—they didn’t know how to program her to be a girl! She has to learn how to be a girl! That’s where the comedy comes in, watching her grow up and get a whole new attitude. She’s like super smart in a way, but she’s always doing stuff wrong, a complete klutz at dating. Just like teenagers, get it? She’s not ugly, though, just Hollywood ugly. Throw away the glasses, she burns paint off the walls.

So they send D.A.R.I.A. (just DARIA after this because the periods are too hard to type) out for a test drive to a local high school. The company figures, hey, if she can navigate high school, she can do anything. It’s sort of like “My Living Doll” meets “The Bionic Woman” meets “My Life as a Teenage Robot” meets “Small Wonder” as a teenager! Except there’s only one little problem: the high school they send her to is full of vampires!

Lawndale High is like this special school for teen vampires run by the government. That first scene in the script, where the van drops DARIA off at school and she sees those kids eating that one bearded guy? The bearded guy is a terrorist. The government lets the vampire kids eat terrorists and drink their blood, which is okay, no one’s going to have a shit fit with that, but sometimes the wacky kids screw up and bite someone else with a beard, like a rabbi or a sea captain or a college professor. It’s comic relief! I mean, the good guy victims won’t get killed, the government steps in and takes them away in an ambulance or something and makes them forget about the vampire kids that were trying to eat them, so it’s okay. But real terrorists, they’re lunchmeat. Maybe the government sends all its death-row inmates there, too, as appetizers. If “Hogan’s Heroes” can make fun of Nazi prison camps, we can go the limit here. (Need some funny one-liners for terrorists while they’re being drained and eaten, help me out with this if you have time.)

But wait—there’s more! Forget Tom and Trent and Ted, they’re history. One of the vampire kids at Lawndale High isn’t a vampire: he’s a black guy who’s an alien from space, investigating Earth! It’s like “Brother from Another Planet” meets “Men in Black,” one of which I think was a black guy. I haven’t seen either movie, but it’s dead on anyway. (Dead on, get it? Vampire school?) Anyway, this black kid is named LeBron (not “Mack” —seriously, who would ever name a black kid that?) Mackenzie. That’s like his public name, no one can pronounce his real name. He enrolled in Lawndale High to see what Earthlings are like so he can report back to his home planet (which is also black). And he’s thinking, man, what is wrong with these Earthlings, drinking blood and everything? Is everyone like that here? And then he meets DARIA and he thinks, finally, someone normal! Get it? He thinks the robot is normal! We can milk this gag for years!

LeBron has special powers. He can shoot lasers out of his eyes (easy to do with CGI) and can pick up a school bus—but he’s a tiger with a kitten inside. He’s a good guy, but he’s been on Earth a long time without anyone to get along with but a school full of vampires. So he meets DARIA—and the sparks fly! Female and male, white and black, robot and alien, we’re covering all the bases here. He’s the rock to DARIA’s ocean, the hot dog to her bun. (I’m being symbolic here, keep up with me.) He wears a magic sword over one shoulder like Blade, only he doesn’t look like Wesley Snipes so it looks fresh and new.

But things aren’t as easy as they sound. In a word: VAMPIRES! Jane Lane (the suits wanted her, they’ve got her) is like one of the leaders of the school’s vampires. She’s not an official leader because vampires don’t have official leaders, just popular unofficial leaders like that quarterback Kevin, but Jane’s got a following anyway. Jane sees DARIA and thinks something’s different about her. The new girl won’t drink blood for lunch—in fact, she won’t even EAT lunch, she always claims to be on a diet (good source there for one-liners). Jane’s suspicious of DARIA and pretends to be her friend to keep a close eye on her and figure out her secret. She’s suspicious of LeBron, too, but she kind of likes him. A lot of vampire kids respect LeBron, but some try to eat him anyway and he has to kill them. It gets sort of clumsy having to kill his classmates, but we’ll play it for laughs.

And there’s Lawanda, the black vampire girl in the self-esteem class with DARIA and LeBron. (Really, a black kid named Jodie? Where did that come from?) Lawanda’s got her sights set on LeBron Mackenzie to be his Queen of the Damned, but DARIA’s in the way, so the robot white chick has to go—only Lawanda can’t kill DARIA! Every time she tries to bite DARIA, she breaks a tooth and has to go to the vampire dentist or whatever. Hilarious! The audience will drink it up! (Get it? Like blood?)

LeBron keeps it a secret from DARIA that he’s an alien, because he doesn’t want to scare her off. DARIA won’t tell LeBron she’s a robot, because she’s programmed not to tell anyone, but being around LeBron stirs up all these strange new girlish feelings inside her, stuff that wasn’t in her programming. She’s becoming more than a robot: she’s turning into a real woman on the inside (“Bicentennial Man” meets… um, “Daria”!), and LeBron is destined (we can drag it out) to be her one true love. (We’re not getting into the sex thing here right away. Let the audience use its imagination until Season Three.)

This series is going to be to television what “Titanic” was to the movies: millions and millions of weepy romantic women hanging on to every episode. That end scene in the first script (attached) at the UFO convention, when LeBron sees an exhibit about aliens and he gets a little homesick and sheds a tear from his ear (his people cry from their ears, not their eyes), but then DARIA comes up and stands beside him really close, and he sees her and smiles and they walk off together—people are gonna bawl right in their living rooms when that happens. I feel like crying whenever I think of it. No, seriously, I do.

And that’s it. Read the script this time so you can answer anything the suits throw at you. This will be TEH AWESOMENESS!!! It can’t lose!

Call me when the money hits my bank account, but hurry, they’re going to repossess my furniture in two days. Already lost my electricity.

Rick

P.S. Does “Mackenzie” sound too Canadian? We can change that if need be.

====================================

Monday, February 8, 2010, 07:15:03 AM

From: slikrick-freelance@boggle.com

To: carson.kitt@programming.mtv.com

Re: Re: Re: Proposal for “THAT’S DARIA!” MTV teen sitcom

Carson,

God damn it, what is going on there? Is everyone in that board room a retard? (No offense against retards or you, that was just a joke.) But seriously, WTF???

I’m not going to even dignify their bullshit about “too much going on” and “offensive to nonwhite viewers” and “where’s Daria’s family?” and me turning DARIA into a sex robot. I didn’t even know there was such a thing! I was being original! Or I thought I was. Forget it, it’s all history, because I have the best revamp of all right here. One more time, dude, here we go: Daria Morgendorffer is back—with a giant penis!

TEN WORDS: “The Hard Times of RJ Berger” meets “The L Word,” futanari style! (I don’t give a shit how many words that is, just use it.) Daria Morgendorffer (hate that name) has a secret: she drank too much uranium water back in Texas, and now she’s the Vera “Wang” of the teen world! (Get it? Wang?) This can’t lose! Think about it: what do teenagers think about all the time? SEX! What more do I have to say? MTV’s turning more hardcore these days, so it’s SOLID RIGHT-ON WIN!

Daria goes to Lawndale High, like in the original, only she and her sister Quinn know that Daria’s packing a sequoia for wood! She’s still a girl inside, still all feminine (she wears pink and white instead of green and black, hate those colors together), but now so much more. She meets Jane Lane in self-esteem class, and Jane gets to be her best friend. But here’s the catch: Jane’s bi-curious! She goes AC and DC. She gets in the school shower with Daria after PE that first day and discovers her new friend has the best of both worlds! So we’ve got that dynamic going, Jane trying to be both a best friend and being majorly tempted by the big cucumber in the Garden of Eden. Jane is Gabrielle to Daria’s Xena, or the other way around, whatever. Lots of comic tension, sort of like “Three’s Company” in some way I haven’t figured out yet.

But there’s more! Halfway through the first episode (attached) Quinn lets a few hints drop that her “adopted half-step-cousin” is a gender bender, and some of the other kids at school get a little curious themselves. That blonde bombshell Brittany, for instance—wow, that just melts my brain thinking about it! (This comes up—ha ha! get it?—in episode two, at the party in Brit’s house.) That scene in the auditorium in the first episode (attached) where Daria is trying to talk about self-esteem in front of the audience, but Brittany’s wearing that low-cut sweater in the front row and Daria’s doorknocker starts banging for real—I laugh myself silly over that. Everyone will. It’s all about gender roles and growing up and eighth-grade boner jokes. I CAN HAS WINNER!!!

Call me back if the suits have interest but need more. We can cross it with Harry Potter, no problem, and make Lawndale High like Hogwarts, with towers and brooms. But don’t call back if the suits piss on it. I’m about to lose my phone, too, come Thursday, and then I’ll be living in my Volvo.

Rick

====================================

Friday, February 12, 2010, 10:17:28 AM

From: slikrick-freelance@boggle.com

To: carson.kitt@programming.mtv.com

Re: Proposal for “THAT’S DARIA!” MTV teen sitcom

Carson, my best buddy, my main man,

You rule, dude. You get 10% as we agreed. You can probably buy Venezuela with that and have change left over. TOLD YOU the suits would love the “big wang” proposal! The other stuff was just to soften them up. We can use it later when they decide to revamp “Beavis and Butt-head.”

Gotta go, compadre. Got an appointment at the yacht shop. I’m taking something out of petty cash to go buy an aircraft carrier and name it THE BIG ONE. (Get it?) Seriously. Catch you at the next MTV Awards.

King Rick I of the Domain of L.A.

word, dude

====================================

Original: 03/20/10, 05/05/10

FINIS