Carmen Sandiego (character)
Carmen Sandiego is a fictional character featured in a long-running series of educational computer programs and television shows originally focusing on teaching geography and history (the series later branched out into other subjects). The character later appeared in a series of books and on many licensed products.
In the stories Carmen was orphaned at an early age and was sent to live at GoldenGate Girls' School in San Francisco. When she was 10 she won a geography game show. This orphanage was the only home she until Chief at the ACME Detective Agency gave her a home there. At ACME Sandiego was a success and rose through ACME's ranks faster than any agent ACME history. There are three people know who were once her partner; Suhara, Jules Argent and Chase Devineaux. Argent was just a rookie when Sandiego became her partner. They solved many cases together and Argent came to respect Sandiego greatly. Argent still calls Carmen Sandiego "the best partner I ever had."
One of the last cases Carmen Sandiego and Chase Devineaux worked together was the case of the Prometheus Rock. The Rock was meteor that was discovered by an ancient civilization, that tapped into it's awesome powers. When it was stolen, Sandiego and Devineaux were dispatched to Athens, Greece. They were able to find the theives responsible, but noable to locate the whereabouts of the rock.
Solving mysteries was getting too easy for her, so she decided to give herself greater intellectual challenges by outsmarting ACME. Since, Devineaux had been working so closly with her, he had to go undercover and he stopped working with ACME and started working on his own.
After leaving ACME, Carmen founded V.I.L.E. and since she has a soft spot for people who are less capable than herself, she stocked the ranks of her organization with some of the most incompetent villains in the world.
Once V.I.L.E. was founded it soon became common to hear that a world landmark had been stolen. However, Carmen wanted more. So she broke in ACME headquarter and stole the Cronoskimmer, the onlt time travel devise on the planet.
She dropped villians off at different time periods so they could steal something from the past as part of "Project History Sweep." Carmen ultimate plan "Project History Sweep" was steal her own dossier from ACME headquarter beilving to would erase her "embarrasing" ACME history.
Carmen failed, but she wasn't finished with time travel, she stole a Russian project that involved time travel and built her own time machine. Though agents Zack and Ivy managed to thwart her plans, she eventually set up faciluty where she could send one of her villians back in time, with the push of button.
To counteract this, ACME built a giant Cronoskimmer, and sent the squadron leader as well as three time poilets back in time to stop Carmen's plans.
Another plan of Carmen's was steal langaguage. She would do this with new invention called the Bable-On-Machine which was stored in the Tower of Bable in northern Iraq. Chase Devineaux came out of his undercover job to help ACME on this case, but Carmen managed to capture all but one ACME's 13 agents. Agent 13 somehow practically singalhandedly stopped her and destoryed the Bable-On-Machine.
She built a new machine, the Quantum Crystalizer, which could shrink anything into tiny crystals. Agent 13, apparently promoted to Agent 9, helpped Devineaux on this case as well, to recover 12 stolen landmarks. It was soon disocovered, with further investigation, that the Prometheus Rock was power the machine, the same which had disappeared all those years before. A "Power Drain" began sucking all the electrical power from the world, and even ACME shut down. Somehow Agent 9 and Chase Devineaux managed to destroy the machine.
Carmen latter decided that since "Knowledge is Power" she would steal knowledge. To acomplish this task she built Knowledge Robots or KnowBots to steal knowledge. ACME sent groups of agents out to fight these KnowBots, and try to get passwords to break to theif hidouts.
When Carmen isn't wearing one of her numerous disguises, she can be identified by her long brown hair, and will be wearing a red trench coat and fedora.
References:
- Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? v.3.0
- Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? v.3.0
- Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego: Treasure of Knowledge
- Carmen Sandiego Word Detective
- Carmen Sandiego Math Detective
- Carmen Sandiego's ThinkQuick Challenge
- Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? Gameshow
- Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? Animated Series
There is a popular line of educational software mystery games based on Carmen Sandiego. Each game of the series has a particular theme and subject, where the player must use his or her knowledge to find Carmen or any of her innumerable henchmen. This series was originally produced by Broderbund, but it is now produced by The Learning Company.
Carmen Sandiego has inspired three television shows: