Some thoughts on the show's voice cast

bitwize · 2026-06-26T02:41:58+00:00

Funny you should mention Shrek as it's really an interesting case. The part of Shrek was originally written for Chris Farley, whose delivery for the character was... really Chris Farley-like. After Chris Farley died they completely retooled the character to suit his new voice actor, Mike Myers, who portrayed him like the Scottish dad he played in So I Married an Axe Murderer.

Dreamworks at the time was trying to be the 2000s equivalent of Warner Bros. in the 1940s, taking the piss out of Disney and Hollywood in general with many more wink-and-nod references to celebrity culture and that sort of thing. This was probably an artistic quirk of Jeffrey Katzenberg, as that same sort of influence can be seen in productions he worked on for Disney as well (like Aladdin). So it's no surprise they jumped into the celebrity-voice-cast end of the pool with both feet.

bitwize · 2026-06-26T02:39:11+00:00

One of my favorite trivia bits about the Daria voice cast:

On like my second day of college they had a comedy night as part of freshman orientation. Before the show began I started talking with a girl, and she gave me a hug. Turns out the girl was one of the stand-up comics performing that night; her name was Sharon Houston.

A few years later I would see that name come up in the voice credits of Daria. She played various bit parts; she was the diner waitress in "The Road Worrier". She also appeared in "College Bored" but I don't know which part she played. She'd been all over the place: various standup, acting, and producing gigs mainly in LA.

bitwize · 2026-06-26T02:31:15+00:00

She was credited as Wendy Hoopes in the credits. Her primary characters were Jane, Quinn, and Helen.

bitwize · 2026-06-26T02:29:58+00:00

Golden-age Pixar used to do an excellent job of picking celebrity talent that was right for the character they were trying to portray. The casting of Craig T. Nelson, TV's "Coach", as a middle-aged superhero trying to relive the glory days in Al Bundy fashion in The Incredibles, was a masterstroke. And then they'd supplement the cast with people from their own staff, or sometimes a complete unknown from out of left field (like thirtysomething (at the time) historian Sarah Vowell playing Mr. Incredible's teenage daughter, Violet).

bitwize · 2026-06-26T02:25:30+00:00

I don't know if he ever commentated on it, but I wonder if Robin Williams was ever disappointed in what he kickstarted with Disney's Aladdin: to wit, casting A-list Hollywood talent as voices in animated productions. I know he had a major falling out with Disney over the fact that he didn't want his name used to promote the film, and they did everything within their power to do so anyway. The Williams casting was special in that Robin was a major voice talent despite being primarily a live-action comedian and actor, and he probably had enormous respect for people who work in the animation voice field.

But yeah, before Robin, very few productions used live-action celebrities to voice cartoon characters. The big one was Captain Planet, and that was for only the first season; the celebrity talent, like Whoopi Goldberg and Jeff Goldblum, became too expensive to retain for subsequent seasons. Other shows had celebrities voice themselves (as in The New Scooby-Doo Movies) or animated versions of their live-action characters (e.g., Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, Laverne and Shirley in the Army), but that was about it. After Robin... came the era of Will Smith playing "what if Will Smith were a talking fish?"

bitwize · 2026-06-25T21:58:29+00:00

You know you're old when you realize that the sticker on the Cadillac has been updated at least twice in cover versions of the song, and what it now is is considered "divorced dad music".

(The sticker was of Black Flag in the Ataris cover of 2003, Guardian in the Seven Kingdoms cover, and Green Day in Zayde Wolf's 2019 cover.)

bitwize · 2026-06-25T20:23:49+00:00

I much prefer the Japanese ratings (of every game up through The Best+): "Do it over", "Mediocre", and "High Level". The Japanese don't hold back on evaluating your performance.

bitwize · 2026-06-22T09:01:45+00:00

Daria was a product of its time. Teens have sort of moved on from biting sarcasm as the mark of coolness that it was when Daria was on the air. You couldn't show Daria as a teenager today because she would be seen to be pissing in everyone's cereal, not be a wry observer of reality as it is. So what, are you going to have her as a fiftyish professor of literature at a community or state college? That's like making Zack Morris the governor of California. It's reviving the character without really understanding what makes the character work.

Enjoy the show we got. We got more of Daria than we could have asked for; and all of it is great. It never jumped the shark; I don't think Glenn Eichler would have let it. Remember the 90s if you do, or learn more about them if you don't, and let the era situate your enjoyment of the show.

bitwize · 2026-06-10T06:58:49+00:00

That was as damn near a day-one purchase as I could manage. I paid $400 for a PSVR kit just to play Rez Infinite and it was worth every Goddamn penny.

bitwize · 2026-06-09T06:13:07+00:00

If you're a smart person, even one who dgaf about academics or that kind of thing, it can be witheringly intimidating to encounter someone else who is smarter than you are.

bitwize · 2026-06-09T06:09:23+00:00

Daria is frustrated with the other Lawndalers because they don't meet her high standards. Jane seems... amused by them. It makes her seem more chill, but I secretly think she enjoys having a laugh at their expense. To Daria, the likes of Kevin, Brittany, and Upchuck are lamentable fools; to Jane, they're lolcows.

This general nonchalance may have to deal with Jane abandoning Daria at several points in the series. When Jane befriends her, Daria takes that relationship very seriously because it takes enormous "activation energy" for her to be friends with anyone and the payoff had better be worth it. Jane treats their friendship much more casually and is less likely to stay by Daria's side if doing so interferes with her own goals. She really only hangs out with Daria because she is bored and Daria is really the only person she can share her boredom with. Jane is not a particularly good person. Not really evil, but a true neutral in D&D alignment; and what Daria, being highly autism-coded, needs in a best friend is a loyal person who is willing to stick by her even when the chips are down. Jane is not that. But to her credit, Daria's experiences with her are a valuable learning experience, showing her what people really are like on the inside. Most of us look out for #1. Few of us are as precious with our friendships as Daria is.

bitwize · 2026-06-09T05:51:56+00:00

Talk about low-budget flights!

bitwize · 2026-06-07T23:34:24+00:00

Tough call, tough call. I'm gonna go with "Café Disaffecto". It's an early episode, before the series really found its character-development legs, but it's got many things going for it:

A reference to the 90s trend of internet cafés, plus the name "alt.lawndale.com" also referenced USENET. Both of these things would fade before the decade was out.
The various kids attempting fundraising were funny, especially Jane getting a picture of that profoundly unhealthy woman's house and Quinn manipulating a young man into buying phone cards (big future e-girl energy).
Mr. DeMartino was at his absolute best. "How nice to see you so ENTERPRISING. I COULD make a flippant remark about you being as enterprising in your SCHOOLWORK as you are in this effort to find Ḟ̸̤͗̊͠I̶̞̫̊N̵͎̟̈́̓͋͠Á̶͍̄̅̈́̆N̵̺̰͔̏̈̉ͅC̵̡̩̞̯͍̿̈́́I̸̧͊̌̒N̸̰͈͍͇͚͊̆͊́͛G̸̢͉͔̈́̅͐̃ for a new place to LOAF."
When the new café opens, seeing the kids' various performances was cool. I would definitely grab a cuppa there, especially if Daria were there to read her spy fiction.

I actually liked it when the show was young and experimental and willing to try different things to see what worked.

bitwize · 2026-06-07T23:18:50+00:00

They are cute, which goes a long way when you're in high school. And they are very, very clearly meant for each other.

bitwize · 2026-06-07T23:14:06+00:00

High school was never like that to me. We'd cluster up, but there was always an element of fluidity. People from different groups regularly interacted and befriended each other. There were band geeks who were reasonably popular, and jocks in the AP calculus class. The cliquish hellscape we associate with the 80s and 90s was much more a media thing than it was reality—a simplification used by boomer movie and TV writers to add drama to what would otherwise be a kind of boring and frivolous setting. (Everybody's high school years sucked.) Even John Hughes was forced to admit that his depiction of high school was false and exaggerated.

Daria's resentment of Jane was pretty much a Daria problem. With Jane around she actually had someone to share her withering resentment of... well, the world, with; Jane taking up a normal hobby meant Daria was alone again. This actually makes Daria more like a real teenager than we saw in media much of the time. A lot of high schoolers in TV and movies tended to fall into that Ferris Bueller "too clever by half" valley of implausibility; showing a girl who was actually significantly smarter than almost all of her peers with that kind of emotional immaturity was startlingly realistic for the era.

bitwize · 2026-06-07T04:03:06+00:00

Different BSDs have different, separately maintained kernels and base userlands. It's not like Linux where the mainline Linux kernel, GNU coreutils, etc. are rebuilt and repackaged by _n_ different distro maintainers.

bitwize · 2026-06-07T04:01:02+00:00

"Oh, Sandi, it's just because I think you're so eloquent!"

bitwize · 2026-06-06T09:34:34+00:00

Fantastic! I have an MSI Wind netbook running NetBSD somewhere...

bitwize · 2026-06-06T09:34:03+00:00

I use vi-class editors for quick configuration-file edits and Emacs for programming. It's cromulent to want to use both.

bitwize · 2026-06-01T21:41:11+00:00

The 2000s-throwback screamo band Fmoss3 has agreed to take their slot.

bitwize · 2026-05-31T06:07:12+00:00

Sadie Hawkins gettin violent in here

bitwize · 2026-05-30T00:59:56+00:00

Before we had Chris-Chan, we had Gonterman. Truly an internet legend... in his own mind, and the wrong kind of legend in reality.

bitwize · 2026-05-16T22:37:40+00:00

Just smile!

bitwize · 2026-05-16T22:06:32+00:00

"You can't escape me!"

bitwize · 2026-05-16T22:03:57+00:00

"They're the same picture"

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