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F*** Yeah Carmen Sandiego
A blog dedicated to the world’s greatest thief, in all her appearances. Not a spoiler-free blog.
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Interesting tidbit from Mystère au bout du monde: The Chief’s name is apparently Margaret O’Hara. (This conflicts, incidentally, with the chapter books, in which her first name is Velma.)
I don’t really have enough followers to make even the smallest of dents in their like count, to be honest.
Frankly, though, I don’t believe that a.) they have a chance of getting to 1 million, since they’re only a little over 25k now, or b.) they won’t release the app if they don’t get to a million. It’s just a marketing gimmick, I think; they wouldn’t refuse to release something that would make them money just because they didn’t get enough Facebook likes.
Promo poster for the Where in the World game show. It was just posted by the official PBS Parents account (and lbr, it’s kind of awesome that PBS Parents has an official Tumblr), but their copy is in really low resolution, so here’s a nice HQ version I found on Wikimedia Commons.
Mine too!
V.I.L.E. and ACME were working together the whole time! Everything was a fucking ruse!
Pretty good read about the old TV show “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego”, amazed that some kids were able to pull it off at all.
I wrote about the evil stylings of Carmen SanDiego for WORN Fashion Journal, which is cool and all but WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT ILLUSTRATION?!
Having played through the five episodes of the most recent Carmen game, I can say that I found it enjoyable, but not really worthy of the $30 price point. (Then again, I know that most video games are even more absurdly expensive.) I played the Wii version, so I don’t know if anything was changed for the Windows version (I couldn’t play that one, since I’m a Mac user).
First, the good: The game seems like an attempt to try to tie together the Carmen universe, which as we all know has such disparate attributes as to be irreconcilable in one unified canon. The villains mostly come from Word Detective, Math Detective, and Where in Time, but some come from the Where in the World show, and Ivan Idea appears, albeit as an Acme higher-up rather than a Good Guide. Best of all, Suhara has a small part. That said, it kind of defeats itself in unifying canon, since it changes the villains’ and Ivan’s appearances, and introduces yet another version of The Chief, this time one who’s apparently shrouded in mystery, wears a hat, etc etc. (It’s all very Dr. Evil.) I do give them credit, though, for finally making the villains multicultural; for example, Jacqueline Hyde now comes from the Balkans, and Jane Reaction is Malaysian. It’s very nice to see the characters moving away from all being White bread. We also get full bios of each of the villains, which is really fun.
Yet I was disturbed by the level of racism in episode 3, which at one point stoops to an “in Soviet Russia” joke (they don’t use the word Soviet, but it’s the familiar form). While I admit I found the joke funny, the whole episode was full of negative stereotypes of Russia, which I found very distressing in general, but maybe even more so since the games’ point is presumably to teach geography as well as math. You can have fun without mocking other cultures.
