Beyond Beavis And Butt-Head Once Referred To As ‘Diarrhea,’ Mtv Finds Another Animated Star In Dry-Humored Daria

Daria stands 5-foot-2 in her stomper boots. She regards the world’s inanities through thick black-rimmed eyeglasses and an even thicker veil of ironic detachment. She never laughs.

“But she smiles,” the producer objects. She’s worried that the 16-year-old star of MTV’s acerbic new animated series is sounding a bit … inanimate.

“Yeah,” the show’s story editor chimes in. “She smiles every time something bad happens to a family member.”

OK, Daria Morgendorffer smiles, though very slightly and only on rare vengeful occasions. Otherwise, her wisecracks are so deadpan - as she endures psycho teachers, clueless parents, an irritatingly perky younger sister and nitwit high-school classmates whose names all seem to end in “y” - that you worry about her hemoglobin level. She’s the Duchess of Droll.

“It’s just part of high school - some people mature quickly intellectually, but they’re stuck in this Romper Room mentality,” the series’ story editor, Glenn Eichler, says with some empathy. “They wish they had someone to turn to and say, ‘Aren’t these people stupid?’ “

Enter Daria (pronounced DAH-ree-ah), whose response to being placed in a remedial self-esteem class is a sarcastic mutter: “I don’t have low self-esteem… . I have low esteem for everyone else.”

She’s racked up impressive ratings since her spring debut as the cable network’s sharp female counterpart to the moronic Beavis and Butt-head.

Declarations of a Golden Age of Animation make Eichler and Susie Lewis Lynn, the co-creative supervisors of “Daria,” a bit uneasy. “It’s a Bronze-ish Age,” Eichler demurs, noting that cable networks involve a tradeoff - greater freedom for smaller audiences and comparatively modest budgets. But, he adds, “It’s a good time to be in animation, no question… . I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a wave of animation on the broadcast networks in two years” - the time it will take network programmers to respond with their own series.

Eichler and Lynn are both veterans of “Beavis and Butt-head,” where Daria first won a walk-on role after creator Mike Judge and colleagues suddenly realized there wasn’t a single female in the show.

“It would be perfectly in character for a really smart, alienated girl to hang out with those guys just to irritate her parents,” says Eichler, who was that show’s story editor as well. Daria, who looked very different in her “B&B” incarnation, found the two chuckling idiots perversely amusing; they called her, with no particular fondness, “Diarrhea.”

Spinning off an entire show for Daria, however, took some persuasion. “You go through a long period of letting the bosses get used to the idea that they’re going to be spending some money,” Eichler says. “It’s like growing a really, really slow plant.”

Though an animated show is less likely to see its actors demand a million bucks an episode, it’s not cheap - start-up costs often outstrip the price of a new live-action sitcom. “It’s a very labor-intensive medium,” Eichler says.

“Daria,” for instance, requires about 35 artists, supervised by Lynn, and a squadron of six to eight free-lance writers (including a “Simpsons” veteran and a couple of “News Radio” writers) commanded by Eichler.

It also employs actors (a writer of MTV on-air promotions named Tracy Grandstaff provides Daria’s Gobi-dry voice), directors, design supervisors and assorted aides de camp. The actual animation work is done in Korea.

Producing each half-hour takes 10 months. Even at a budget of less than $500,000 per episode, half the cost of a major network’s animated sitcom, “Daria” represents a sizable investment for MTV; the heh-heh boys, whose show relies heavily on music videos, come cheaper.

MEMO: “Daria” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday and 10:30 p.m. Monday on MTV, channel 33 on TCI Cable in Spokane.