Carmen Sandiego (character)

Carmen Sandiego is a fictional character featured in a long-running series of American educational software 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.

Carmen Sandiego was originally conceived in 1983 by a group of software designers at a then young company known as Broderbund Software. To inspire kids to learn geography, the creators wanted a female "heroine" whose name sounded different, but was unmistakably easy to pronounce. Her first software game "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" was made in 1985.

The Carmen software series helps children with history, geography, and recently, math and language arts skills. "Where in the World," "Where in the USA," and "Where in the World...Jr. Detective Edition" are the geography based games; "Where in Time"/"Great Chase through Time" (Where in Time's alternate name) is the history based game; "World Detective" is the language arts based game, and "Math Detective" is the mathamatics based game. The award-winning series continues to grow each year with new titles and updated versions of old games. The series of games once released by Broderbund Software is now being released by The Learning Company which purchased Broderbund in 1990's. The first title released by The Learning Company was "Carmen Sandiego's Think Quick Challenge" a quiz game.

Carmen's character has starred in 3 television shows. Two of the shows were in a game show format and aired on PBS. The first was Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? , and it aired from 1991 to the fall of 1996. It was follwed by Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? which aired until 1998. The third series was an animated series that aired on Fox.

In February of 1994, Carmen appeared in an animated series that aired on the Fox Network for 3 seasons (in later years it aired on both Fox Family Channel and Pax TV) entitled, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? . Carmen was voiced by Rita Moreno, and the series won an Emmy in 1995.

Carmen was the spokesman for Amtrak in the spring of 1998. She had a cameo on the show, Animaniacs in the episode, "Aquaintances."

See also: List of Carmen Sandiego products