This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer. Find all my work at MJMunoz.com.
So, this is a topical episode of Story Over Everything, where I'm going to be talking,
of course, more about serials. I want to kind of dive into the history of serials and the
differences between serial and episodic. And standalone gets worked in there too. I will
tell you upfront, I worked with ChatGTP to help me source information on this, and I'm
curating some of what was given to me. But I'll be presenting straight to you some of
the stuff that came from it. But, yeah, I still think this counts as me doing research.
And if you don't like it, I don't know what to tell you. Goodbye, I guess. Or stick around
and see if you like how I do this or not. So anyway, without further ado, I'm going
to go ahead and get right into it. And go ahead and say that, you know, I've got kind
of the overview of the history. So serial storytelling, also known as, well, we'll talk
about that later. There are multiple types of serial storytelling. There's, well, that's
not true. So serial storytelling is part of series storytelling, but you can have episodic
or you can have serial. Episodic things stand alone. It's within the same shared world or
universe. Recurring characters pop up and to some extent there are recurring scenarios
or types of scenarios, trials that a certain character goes through again and again. And
but you know, it's a different trial every time. Their life is always on the line or
whatever. I'm thinking about, you know, ancient heroes, heroes of myth facing different dangers
and wonders, I guess, as they go about doing things. And that's something, you know, that's
in mythology. So that would be episodic. Serials where the things build upon each other and
you are meant more to take each story in, in a particular order so that they build upon
each other properly for the overall narrative that has a certain arc to it, whether that
be character or I guess plot or story. So that's the rough definition of it. And then
from here, now I'm going to go and read from the list. So ancient times, there was oral
storytelling before the advent of written languages. Stories were passed down orally
from generation to generation. These stories were often told in episodes, like I mentioned,
with each episode building on the last. For example, the epic poems of Homer, the Iliad
and the Odyssey were originally recited orally and told in episodic form. Now it's been
a long time, but I did read the Iliad in high school and I know of stuff from the Odyssey
and it kind of reminds me of like the Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, which I'm currently
reading for my big book chat at the end of the month that I'm planning and working on
developing where it's again, the same character, the same world, same setting, but different
adventures that the character goes on. And they kind of do build on each other, but they
kind of don't. They're a little loosely connected, I would say. In the 19th century, serial novels
became a popular form of entertainment and serialized novels began to appear in newspapers
and magazines. Charles Dickens was one of the most famous writers of serialized novels
with works like Oliver Twist and Great Expectations originally published in installments, which
is really interesting. In the early 20th century, serial radio dramas became a thing. They were
very popular and yeah, they were very popular. And one of the most famous things is The Shadow,
which aired, well, this is from 1930, but I thought it was 1937. It was for sure the
books. I think the 30s, 1930 is when The Shadow was an announcer on the radio and he didn't
get his own show until 1937, but it did run until 1954 with some sort of hiatus in there
for the war, I believe. But you know, that's one of them. And interestingly enough, I've
been talking about The Shadow over on Red Panda Report, which you can also find on NMJMUNUOS.com.
I reviewed a couple of those episodes and that was all in preparation for me to talk
about Red Panda, which is very much inspired by The Shadow. Red Panda is done, Red Panda
Adventures is done by Greg Taylor. And those are serial stories in the style of the old
radio dramas, as opposed to, or in contrast to the more episodic Black Jack Justice episodes,
also written and directed by Greg Taylor and hosted at Dakota Ring Theater. So that's kind
of germane to my interest right now. So I'll just share that. Next thing is says mid 20th
century serial television drama. In the mid 20th century, television became the dominant
form of entertainment and serial storytelling moved to the small screen. Soap operas were
very popular and they were a form of serialized drama. I remember being a kid watching soap
operas with my mom, like before I went into kindergarten, I was, well anyway, whatever.
And I know that those stories built upon each other and there was, you know, long running
storylines and stuff. So that's, you know, obviously that's not episodic because you're
not saying, you know, it's, you know, general hospital. But something, it's a, you know,
it's not general hospital. It's not, you know, what am I trying to say? It's not a general
hospital and they forget what happened like a sitcom or something. It's general hospital
and you need to know what happened seasons ago and you get recaps of the dramatic turns
and twists in the fate of everybody's lives there who's involved at the place, right?
Okay. Late 20th century serial graphic novels. This one, I don't know, I'm going to skip
that because I don't like what it said and it kind of doesn't make sense to me. I would
think manga is the perfect example of serialized graphic novels or comic books because the
way those are run in the Japanese magazines, like, you know, weekly Shonen Jump or whatever,
they're intended to just go on forever and they do build upon themselves to have a long
on running story. And according to some sources, they're meant to just run forever and ever
and ever until the series declines in popularity enough that they basically tell the creative
team working on whatever manga to wrap it up. And, you know, usually I, well, I don't
know if they usually get it closed or not, but that's the intention for the game to actually
wrap up and have an ending and then they're ready to go.
Okay. Let's see. Yeah, I, that's all pretty much. In conclusion, it says overall serial
storytelling has evolved over time, but its fundamental structure of episodic storytelling
remains popular, a popular form of entertainment. Okay. So here's the thing. Periodic or episodic
and serial are not the same. There are actually opposites, but they're opposites. They're
two styles of series that you can have. And of course a series, whether it be book, television,
radio, plays, whatever, there's standalones, which that is a self-contained story has a
beginning, middle and end. There is no intention of it having a sequel and it's not built for
that basically. It's, it's meant to be 100% on its own and not part of something bigger
versus so you've got those versus a serial, which it is intended to go on. However, you
can have at least the two, you know, the two broad types of cereals or sorry, there's standalone
versus series within series. You have serial style and episodic style, episodic. You can
watch any episode and just jump in and get it. And serial, you're supposed to pay closer
attention and watch all of them and stick around to see the story build throughout the
run of the show, movie series, whatever it is. So that's interesting. It gives examples
of, I have examples here of standalone fiction as To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby
and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But I was also thinking like, you know, Jane Austen,
I think all of those, all of her books are standalones. And you've kind of felt like
a, you know, there's a vibe to all her books and you could read them all and enjoy them
as her doing what she does, which is that kind of family drama and the finding love
and those sorts of things. But they're and they're not even I'm not going to say they're
de facto a series. I'm going to say that they are standalones, but because they have the
same subject matter, they can almost feel like they're like an episodic series, but
they're not because they don't contain the same, you know, recurring places or characters
or anything like that, even if they do have like recurring themes of honor or like being
besmirched or ruined in society, that kind of thing. Let's see. Yes. Moving on. So yeah,
like Law and Order, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, those are episodic storytelling because
you don't really need to read all of them. You can read or watch any of them all in any
order that you want to. And the focus is on the procedural aspect of it, the mystery,
so you know, solving the crime, catching the perpetrator and then seeing them prosecuted.
And I'm kind of mixing both Law and Order and Sherlock Holmes there a little bit. But
there's that. And then you have something like it gives you like the Harry Potter series
of books where they all do build upon each other because there's this whole arc with
you know, Voldemort and with Harry growing and him and his friends and whatever his family
drama ironing that I never finished. I never finished watching all the movies or reading
all the books. So I don't know. I can't speak too much about Harry Potter, but I do know
it's a series and it builds on itself and you're meant to enjoy them all together so
that you get the full story. Let me see. Is there anything else I wanted to add? So I
mean that helps me think about the way I want to do my series because I do want series,
but I'm almost thinking for like my superhero series for example, which is all at least
the first generation, but it's all pulp inspired. Maybe I want to do a blend. Maybe some characters
get a serial series and some characters get an episodic series. And then when they cross
over or yeah, I guess when they cross over they're the episodic character, like you'll
be able to pin them down as to where in the serial storytelling they fall. And yeah, I
don't know because I do have a detective character, but if I make a detective character, you know,
a private eye who's got episodic storytelling, isn't that what all private eyes have? Episodic
storytelling. Isn't that trite and boring and shouldn't I avoid that? Should I instead
give my detective, my immortal detective a, sorry, I've been listening to a lot of Dakota
Ring Theater right now, so I'd drop in references and it's popping up in my head all over the
place here. Should I give my detective a story that kind of not ruins him, but that takes
him out of the episodic world of most detectives and gives him a serial story that can show
him change over time? I don't know about that. Something I was thinking for my, I guess my
paragon character in the superhero world is that she would have a serial series that I
have planned out or I've sketched out I'll say. And I was thinking about doing something
with her that would be interesting because I would love to do comic books. And I was
thinking about maybe giving her series as serial, but maybe her comic books are episodic
or I was of both minds about it. I thought, well, I can make her comic book series, serial,
or I could make it episodic and just create a space within the lives of my characters
or at least this one so that I can say there's a period of time where she's just able to
have all these different cool adventures and see all these different things and it doesn't
really matter. In that way the comics can kind of go forever or to a certain extent.
I don't know. I don't know how many you could get to just being episodic and not building
the story upon itself or if it would morph into that. But I see both episodic and serial
series as perfectly valid forms of writing and entertainment. And I wonder what qualifies
something as being a good candidate for an episodic story versus a serial story. And
I don't know. Hmm. Yeah, that's something I will have to puzzle over. If you have thoughts
on that, I welcome them and I encourage you to share them with me. You can do that by
checking out the show notes or going to MJMWinnotes.com. And I think I'm going to go ahead and wrap up
right now because I don't have much else to say and this is about 14 minutes. So that's
pretty good. This was a shorter episode. I didn't, I kind of didn't know what to do
because now that I've formulated my idea of having the four different formats of story
over everything and just rotating through them, I do think it's a good idea. It's a
strong idea and it's something I definitely want to stick to. But I have skimming leaves,
which is where I'm going to be casually chatting about Sir Howard Peierls Robin Hood. I have
that coming up at the end of May, 2023. And in between then I have some ideas for what
I want to do for the other episodes, but I kind of had to, I'm at the last week of April
and I had to kind of scramble to figure out, well, what am I going to talk about? And this
was something I'd had written down for a while to discuss, you know, what's the deal with
serials? What, you know, what is, you know, what exactly are they? How do they function?
How do they work? And can I, can I do something with them? Or, you know, I wanted to better
understand, take time to look into them a little bit more and better understand the
nature of them. And now I think I do have a better grasp of the possibilities of what I could do.
Like I said, I'm exploring and curious about going episodic and serial in my series. And I think
that's a fun idea. Like James Bond, Ian Fleming's James Bond books, I believe they're all episodic.
And the movies are certainly all episodic and people are happy to enjoy those for a long time.
And I would say, I'd say the shadow is probably episodic because there were just so many novels
and they span such a great length of time that somehow as time goes on, you just kind of let
it go and you accept that another story is coming out, even though it's been, you know, 30 years
since the original, since the original story. And you just roll with the fact that now the shadow is
now the shadow is battling a super computer that has artificial intelligence and is helping
criminals plan, plan their crimes. That's, that's a real, I think it's the actual last
episode of the shadow and it was released on vinyl in like 68 or something like that.
And it's really cool. The episode is called the computer calculates, but the shadow knows,
calling back of course to the famous line from the shadow. So that's pretty cool. But yeah,
I mean, you can enjoy both forms and both can be valid and I can be okay with writing both types.
I thought for a time that I only really wanted to write serialized series fiction, but the more I've
thought about it and the more I have researched it and you know, the better I understand the concepts.
Um, I do like the idea of both and I think I'll just have to judge for myself when and how to,
uh, when and how to utilize, you know, which format. So anyway, that's, uh, almost it. I'm
going to just wrap up with one more thing, which is to tell you, I have officially launched audio
only podcasts for story over everything, red Panda report, going ultra, which covers the Tokusatsu
Ultraman and, uh, red Panda report, going ultra, uh, story over everything. And by golly, there's
one more, but I don't remember at this time. Let me see. Oh, did you want Chronicles where I'm doing
an audio book of the Digimon web novel that's coming out? Uh, because I like that stuff and I
figure I can, I can do that. So anyway, you can find links to all of those at MJMunius.com. I'm
still adjusting things to get, uh, the, I need to publish the podcasts page so that you can go
there. You can find the latest, uh, I think it's 10 or so episodes of each podcast. And as time goes
on, they'll drop off the, it'll only be the 10, it'll only be the 10, five to 10 most recent.
And then I'll have links for you to subscribe to the RSS feed or the iTunes feed or the whatever
it is feed and whatever podcast you use. But I need to work on expanding that because it's only,
I only have three services activated and there's more than three that can be utilized. So I'd like
to have it spread as far as it can go, but I encourage you to check that out and, uh, that you
check out, um, my progress on the GrowBug series. I think I'll drop a link to, um, the draft for
Ava and the GrowBug in the show notes for this episode. So you can see them. And I'm trying to
structure my show notes so that I have my link to the, you know, the show notes in your podcast
player are going to have the link to the actual show notes on the website, uh, a link to whatever
I want you to read. I'm encouraging you to read or check out and then, um, not much else because
the show notes are kind of ugly in the, uh, the podcast service that I'm using. I need to figure
out how to format those properly. But anyway, uh, I am doing that as part of my, uh, part of my pitch,
part of my process, part of my, um, well, you know, it's for my own satisfaction, but it's also for
marketing everything I'm doing with my writing. And, uh, I am writing based on, I'm writing things
that are in the field of interest of people who enjoy Tokusatsu like Ultraman or who enjoy, uh,
pulpy stuff like, uh, the red panda or the shadow. Um, yeah, cause I'm basically making the superhero
universe that while it's rooted more in Western comics and it's starting off as like a pulp,
it's kind of saying, what if in, uh, 1900 the world changed basically, and we had a shift where, uh,
you know, superheroes became a big thing in a big way and it just dramatically altered the course
of the world. And we had, you know, super robots and cyborgs and, you know, demonic forces that
are being fought by heroic people and just kind of a whole fun mishmash of a bunch of different things,
um, to create one solid superhero world, uh, that I'm, you know, plotting and planning and
executing myself. So anyway, uh, again, I encourage you to go to MJMunoz.com to find
everything that I do. And with that, I'm going to wish you well, I guess best wishes to you is
what I'm trying to say. This is MJ signing out. I hope you enjoyed that. Go to MJMunoz.com to leave
any questions, comments, or other feedback you might have. There you can find all of my analysis,
art and fiction. I cover books, Tokusatsu, comic books, anime, and more. Look around. You're sure
to find something else that you'll enjoy as well. This has been a story over everything production.