BW Media Spotlight

I’ve been watching Superfriends on MeTV Toons. It’s the show that sparked my interest in the DC Universe and why I became a DC fan, but that doesn’t matter here and I’ve gone over this enough times. I bring it up because whatever faults the show might have had (the science is totally questionable, perhaps you spotted the animation error with Batman at one point) one thing it did well was narration.

The third person narrator is a dying art. I know I’ve written about this before, but that was a long time ago and a refresher is always nice. While prose can’t get away from it, the narrator who isn’t a character in the story is gone from television and movies, video games seem to only use it to tell you the controls or in some biographical section, and even audio has fought against it. Comics seem to have abandoned the narrator altogether, or had the characters do a first person “noir” style recounting, but that always falls into one or both problems with first person as a rule:

• How do you know the stuff you weren’t there for?
• Who the heck are you talking to?

Yes, you can have Captain Kirk gives a captain’s log entry or the Phantom writing in the Chronicles, but that limits what you can tell the audience because they still shouldn’t know what the other characters are saying when they aren’t with you, if they were ever with you at all. Is that guesswork? Are you making stuff up? I’m not against this, but I do want to advocate for the advantages of third person narration and ask why storytellers outside of novels are so afraid of this method of informing the readers and viewers what’s going on.

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