Monday, December 8, 2008

Trent's duck phone, and other wild beasts

The Mallard-shaped telephone that Trent uses in "Daria!" appears as a wallpaper image in one of the old MTV Daria sites. But let's go to the missing flipbooks and go through their contents.

We'll start with "Filed Kingdom" (a word-play on the old TV show Wild Kingdom, which was about animals). Here are the text lines to each of the missing but now unnecessary pix. This was actually part of the current website but was removed for unknown reasons. You may consider this "official," if you like. (You can confirm the contents by going to this URL and right-clicking on the page. The flipbook widget was archived on 20010428, meaning April 28, 2001, so it was online at that time.) Here we go! (Italics mine.)
  1. CHIQUITO THE PARROT—Penny Lane returns from Costa Rica with this high-strung chatterbox in "Lane Miserables." He just might be more musical than Trent.
  2. DOG WITH NINE LIVES—Daria almost runs over him with her car in "Through a Lens Darkly." His name is Pugsly and he's modeled after (Daria producer) Susie Lewis's pet bulldog.
  3. POOR LITTLE MOUSE—This critter is greatly confused and greatly abused in "The Lab Brat." But he does get his revenge by biting Brittany. (She deserved it; she called him a rat!)
  4. DOOMED SPIDER—A trespassing bug that causes Mr. O'Neill to refer to Daria as "Dorian" in "CafĂ© Disaffecto." It is then sentenced to be squished.
  5. NASTY BEE—This annoying insect adds to Daria's humiliation in "Road Worrier." The voyeuristic squirrels weren't very nice either.
  6. LEARY THE DOG—caption: Leary is the pet of holdover hippies Willow and Coyote in "That Was Then, This is Dumb." He's the second in a series of lookalike canines named after Timothy Leary, the famous guru of mind expansion.
  7. SEXY POODLE—This pulchritudinous poodle appears in the first scene of "I Loathe a Parade" on an episode of Sick, Sad World. As Upchuck would say: "Rowwwrrrr!"
  8. CERAMIC TIGER—He's not alive like the others, but he's greaaaaat! Quinn hides behind this oversized porcelain pussycat in "The Invitation."
This list is sure to inspire intense controversy. Why did they not talk about the squirrels, for the love of God? Why no mention of Mister Whiskers? Why no picture of Sandi's cat puking up foundation? Was the squashed spider really more important than Joanna the python? And why wasn't J.B. or Roger the Mouse given more space? ("Pugsly"? Eww.) And only EIGHT animals?

SPECIAL BONUS! An extra picture of Roger the Mouse!

More shocking revelations to come! Hold on to your joysticks!

HEY! Wasn't that Leary #3, not Leary #2?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It definitely was Leary III.

The Angst Guy said...

You will see a number of spelling errors as you go through this stuff (like the "Landen" family), and once in a while an error of fact. Irksome, as I said, but correctable (correctible?).