Daria has a special place in my heart. It looms very large in my memories of my adolescent years, and there's no other tv show to which I have anywhere near the same sentimental connection; it doesn't require any great self-understanding to grasp why my teenage self was so drawn to the sarcastic outsider-dom of Daria and her angular, arty friend Jane, nor why it feels as if the show helped considerably in getting me through that turbulent period. I know I'm not the only one who feels that way, and the show would have been a natural candidate for a dvd release, but licensing problems prevented that, and so for years I felt - again, this isn't overstating it - a kind of void, created by its unavailability.
Anyway, a while ago, I mentioned much of the above to Julian F, who nodded sympathetically, and then, the next time I saw him, presented me with a burned dvd containing seasons 1 and 2, which he'd downloaded in the meantime. So I've been watching it in fits and bursts since then, and finding, rather to my surprise, that I've seen all of the episodes before (ie, back in high school) - surprising because I don't remember watching Daria particularly faithfully or systematically back then, as great a significance as it's since assumed. And I still enjoy it very much, though in a different way, of course - overlaid by the intervening years and by the fact that I no longer feel like my life could be saved by a piece of popular culture (nor that I need saving, at least not in that way).
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I read somewhere that, more recently, there's finally been a dvd release, incidentally, but I think the deal was that they could only manage it by excising all of the musical snippets that are such an important part of the show (particularly given the quintessential 90s-ness of the songs and artists represented) and replacing them with other stuff; that being so, it seemed a better bet to stick with the downloaded, original versions, occasional blurriness and pixelation notwithstanding.
