Narrator: Difference between revisions

[[File:narrator2.jpg|link=Rocky and Bullwinkle|thumb|400px|With speed and dexterity astonishing for a woman of her advancing years, Mother bastes the turkey, tosses the salad, and mashes the potatoes!]]

 

"''[[Describe Topic Here|Describe Narrator here.]]''"

 

 

 

To be a Narrator, the individual must directly relate to the story in some way, if only as the person telling it. For example, [[Alfred Hitchcock]] was ''not'' a Narrator for ''[[Alfred Hitchcock Presents]]'', because his footage was independent of and had no bearing on the story or stories it appeared with. [[Rod Serling]] ''was'' a narrator, because he specifically introduced stories, often provided a lead-in to set them up, and provided a closing after the story footage ended; in one episode he actually ''was'' in the story, explaining how it was clearly ridiculous fantasy until the protagonist hears him and burns an envelope with his name on it, causing him to disappear.

 

 

One way of subverting this trope is to [[Interactive Narrator|have one or more characters able to hear the narrator]] (in most instances, the characters do not hear the narrations), and refuse to do what the narrator describes. Another is to [[Unreliable Narrator|make the narrator a complete liar]].

See [[Narrator Tropes]] for specific types of narrators.

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

** In the Japanese version, [[Jouji Yanami]] is the narrator for all of the series. In the Funimation dub, Brice Armstrong narrates DB, [[Kyle Hebert]] does DBZ, Andy Chandler does DBGT and Doc Morgan does DBZ Kai.

* Detective Manzou (a.k.a. "The Saw"), in ''[[Samurai Champloo]]''. Oddly enough, his narration has a tendency to transcend time, as he has narrated about future events which he could not feasibly be alive long enough to be knowledgeable of, like Vincent Van Gogh, modern Japan's feeling regarding same-sex relationships ("getting back to the Edo period"), the Zen movement in the 1960s, and the cross-cultural popularity of baseball in Japan and America.

** In the original novels, what Kyon says out loud is often (but not always) typeset as narration, which intentionally confuses the reader as to when he is speaking and when he is thinking.

* ''[[Digimon]]'' had an interesting variation on this: in the first two seasons, most episodes began with the previous one being recapped by a character and ended with narration by a generic narrator. However, the third season begins a new-year-is-new-universe format similar to [[Super Sentai]], and from then on, episodes are narrated by one of the previous year's characters!

** Of course, this is just for the dub...which is somewhat abandoned in ''[[Digimon Savers|Savers]]'' in favor of a next episode preview. One of the characters still recap the previous episode, but only when it's needed.

* Who could forget the narrator from ''[[Speed Racer]]''? [[Catch Phrase|Unknown to Speed, Racer X is secretly his older brother, Rex, who ran away from home years ago!]]

* ''[[Princess Tutu]]'' begins every show with a Narrator telling the audience a fairytale. Sometimes it's from the (fictional) fairytale that one of the characters is from, sometimes it concerns a character's backstory, and sometimes it's a story that's somehow related to the episode. Drosselmeyer also serves as an odd narrator in some scenes, appearing on-screen to question details about the characters and the scene, and to occasionally tell the characters (who can rarely hear him) what they ''should'' do. {{spoiler|Considering he's actually writing the story, it makes sense for him to be the narrator.}}

* Judging by [[You Look Familiar|sharing voice actors]] the narrator for the openings of ''[[Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann]]'' may possibly be {{spoiler|Simon at the age in the epilogue}}.

** He is.

* ''[[Kaiji]]'' has a particularly popular narrator, due to his overly [[Serious Business|serious]] tone and use of [[What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic|overblown metaphors]] to describe what's going on.

** He's only a typical narrator in the Japanese version. In the dub, he openly hates his job and tries to seperate himself from the insanity. In one episode, he actually quit his job because the series recycled a plotline too many times, and a new British narrator replaces him until he comes back at the end. He also only does the show because he's deep in gambling debts, apparently.

* ''[[Kimba the White Lion]]'' sometimes uses a narrator who would set up the premise of the episode or go over plot points that the audience may have missed from previous episodes.

== [[Comic Books]] ==

* ''[[Kingdom Come]]'' has a dramatic subversion of this. Norman McKay has been chosen by the Spectre, embodiment of [[God]]'s vengeance, to be the one who witnesses the downfall of the world. As they look, separate from reality but able to observe it, upon the members of the Justice League debating the ethics of what they've done, suddenly the Flash, who exists on all dimensional levels at once, turns around and plucks a very surprised Norman McKay out of the air.

* [[The Sandman]] would occasionally make use of a narration, sometimes it would be one of the series’ characters and other times it would be anonymous but fairly poetic.

* One of [[Frank Miller]]’s signature tropes is his usually hard boiled style narration.

** “Nextwave is in your room and touching you stuff”

* For the Frankenstein segments of [[Grant Morrison]]’s [[Seven Soldiers]] the narrator was also a [[Large Ham]].

 

== [[Film]] ==

** The narrator was also parodied with in the old ''[[George of the Jungle]]'' cartoons, including one point where he made a character in the cartoon crash his plane into the top of the mountain with the warning, "Let that be a lesson to you: never monkey around with a narrator."

* The [[Adam Sandler]] flick ''Eight Crazy Nights'' had narration as well.

* ''Little Children'' plays this oddly straight, with a narrator explicitly saying what the characters are thinking at a given moment. It's surprisingly effective, though frequent PBS viewers will be rather weirded out, as the narrator they use is Will Lyman, the voice of ''Frontline'' and many an episode of ''Nova''.

* Harry Lockheart in ''[[Kiss Kiss Bang Bang]]''.

* ''[[A Christmas Story]]'' is narrated by the adult Ralphie.

* ''(500) Days of Summer'' features a particularly [[Lemony Narrator|citrusy]] one.

* The Criminologist fulfills this role in [[The Rocky Horror Picture Show]].

** "I would like ([[Audience Participation|You would, wouldn't you?]]), if I may (No, you may not), to take you on a strange journey (So strange they made a movie out of it!)."

* It's entirely possible to just listen to ''[[Casino]]'' from another room and understand almost everything that's going on because of the detailed narration.

 

== [[Literature]] ==

* Lemony Snicket, the narrator of ''[[A Series of Unfortunate Events]]'', is essentially omniscient, yet remains a distinct character. He never plays a direct role in the action, but is clearly intertwined with the events: his two siblings are major characters, his picture appears once, and he {{spoiler|loved the protagonists' mother, before she married their father}}. He also appears, unidentified, in The Penultimate Peril, though the character in question is referred to in the third person.

* To some extent, Mike Hanlon in [[Stephen King]]'s ''[[IT]]''. Between every section of the book there is an interlude where Mike narrates the history of It in the form of a documentary journal.

* Every adventure in the ''[[Hank the Cowdog]]'' series is told by Hank himself.

 

* [[Rod Serling]] in ''[[The Twilight Zone]]''.

* Richard Dean Anderson would sometimes serve as a narrator in ''[[MacGyver]]'', either to reveal a chunk of backstory or to describe the principles of his [[Bamboo Technology]].

* Waylon Jennings as the Balladeer in ''[[The Dukes of Hazzard]]'', though his narration was usually restricted to a [[Quip to Black]] along the lines of, "Them Duke boys are in a whole heap of trouble."

* Likewise George, of ''[[Dead Like Me]]'', who narrates from a distance, sometimes showing omniscience and talking directly to the audience, and sometimes just within her head.

* Classic example: the series ''[[The Untouchables]]'' was narrated by famous columnist/political commentator Walter Winchell. His distinctive, urgent, sharply voiced, melodramatic announcements became a television icon, selling corny set up lines similar to this: ''"As Al Capone and his henchmen talked of murder over steaks and bootleg champagne, Eliot NESS and his UNTOUCHABLES made plans to topple his empire of crime!"''

* Jim Dale in ''[[Pushing Daisies]]''.

* JD of ''[[Scrubs]]'' narrates his own life in his head, as well as the lives of nearly everyone he has regular contact with, so he is essentially the narrator of the show. Lucy Bennett takes over this role in the last season.

* Earl Hamner Jr. as the voice of the older John-Boy Walton in ''[[The Waltons]].''

* ''[[Burn Notice]]'' has its main character, Michael, narrate a lot of the story. Most likely this was to allow him to explain the clever tricks he was doing without the need of [[The Watson|a Watson]] hanging around all the time. It also serves as the gimmick of the show.

* ''[[Thomas the Tank Engine]]'': The Narrator is the only voice on the show and provides all the voices for all the characters.

* Mary Alice Young (an omnipresent [[Posthumous Character|dead]] character), on ''[[Desperate Housewives]]''.

 

== [[Music]] ==

 

== [[Radio]] ==

* ''[[Prince of Persia]]: The Sands of Time'' put an interesting twist on this, that the Prince himself was the narrator, and at save points would say, "Would you like to take a break for now?" and if he got killed would say, "Wait, no, that's not how it happened..." In the end, {{spoiler|It's revealed that he's telling the story to Farah, his love interest from the game, after undoing the game's events via time travel. Naturally, she doesn't believe a word of it. Later, in ''The Two Thrones'', after having prevented any of the events of the first game by changing the flow of time in the second (bear with me here...), the game ends with the Prince, once more with Farah, beginning the same narration that opens The Sands of Time.}}

* A very similar conceit is used in ''[[Sacrifice]]'' where the wizard Eldred is telling the story of why the world is ending to {{spoiler|[[The Big Bad]]}}.

** Yuna narrates the sequel.

** It's also implied Alazlam Durai is getting this information from the "Durai Reports", written by his ancestor Olan Durai (who hangs around at the periphery of the plot through much of the game, only actually appearing in battle once)

 

== [[Web Animation]] ==

* Spoofed in a [http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=060722 summer 2006 installment] of the webcomic ''[[Sluggy Freelance]]''.

** spoofed again [http://www.sluggy.com/daily.php?date=080714 in the summer of '08]

 

== [[Web Original]] ==

* A weird example is the Narrator from [http://chimerabazaar.blogspot.com/ The Chimera Bazaar's] spin-off [http://nightmareabyss.blogspot.com/ Nightmare Abyss] who is a main character.

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

* The narrator of ''[[Powerpuff Girls]]'', starting out every episode with, "The City of Townsville:" and ending every episode with a variation of, "[[So Once Again the Day Is Saved|So, once again, the day is saved, thanks to the Powerpuff Girls!]]" In the [[Freaky Friday]] episode, the Narrator ended up sounding like Bubbles at the end.

* The Storyteller in ''[[Dave the Barbarian]]''.

* The narrator of ''[[Sheep in The Big City]]'' has so little fourth wall that he regularly appears on-camera in a recording studio. He interacts with the characters so often it's more noteworthy when they ''can't'' seem to hear him, has been fired, physically attacked...the list goes on.

* The narrator for the British cartoon ''[[Danger Mouse]]'' tended to break the fourth wall; sometimes complaining about the direction of the story or making atrocious puns (only to receive a phone call from the show's producers, telling him to cut it out). In "Once Upon A Timeslip" he developed reality warping powers: "It is now 12:15 as they..." (The landscape transforms into medieval England) "Look, I said 12:15 I didn't mean 1215 AD." The remainder of the episode became a Robin Hood parody. Another typical narration line from one episode:

* A ''[[Family Guy]]'' cutaway shows Peter narrating his own life:

* In [[Word Girl]], other than opening and closing each episode, the disembodied narrator oftentimes interacts with the tittular hero to help her and sometimes the villains, also.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Characters As Device]]

[[Category:Exposition]]

[[Category:Narrator Tropes]]