Carmen Sandiego

"You're learning a lot. Soon, you'll learn that no one can catch Carmen Sandiego."

-Carmen Sandiego, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego v. 3.0

Carmen Isabela 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 released 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; "Word Detective" is the language arts based game, and "Math Detective" is the mathematics 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."

Character Biography

Note: The following information is based heavily on conjectures and cannot be considered canon. Information on the order of events and such are not given in any official material.

Carmen was orphaned at an early age and was sent to live at GoldenGate Girls' School in San Francisco, California. This orphanage was the only home she had 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 in ACME history. There are three people known 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 a meteor that was discovered by an ancient civilization, which tapped into its awesome powers. Its name seems to be a reference to Prometheus, the Titan patron of human civilization in Greek mythology. When it was stolen, Sandiego and Devineaux were dispatched to Athens, Greece. They were able to find the thieves responsible, but not able to locate the whereabouts of the rock.

Solving mysteries was getting too easy for Carmen, so she decided to give herself greater intellectual challenges by outsmarting ACME. Since Devineaux had been working so closely with her, she 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. Her thefts wern't limited to the Earth, either. She has been known to steal things from outer space, such as Saturn's rings. However, Carmen wanted more. So she broke in ACME headquarter and stole the Cronoskimmer, the only time travel device on the planet. The name Cronoskimmer comes from the Greek word Chronos, which means time and in Greek mythology is also the name of its personification.

She dropped villains off at different time periods so they could steal something from the past as part of "Project History Sweep." Carmen's ultimate plan of "Project History Sweep" was to steal her own dossier from ACME headquarters, believing she would be able to erase her "embarrassing" 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 to change the history of colonial America, she eventually set up a facility where she could send one of her villains 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 pilots back in time to stop Carmen's plans.

Another plan of Carmen's was to steal language. She would do this with new invention called the Bable-On Machine which was stored in the Tower of Bable. Its name is a pun on that of the legendary Tower of Babel. "Bable-On" is a play on Babylon, Iraq which is usually identified with Babel. Chase Devineaux came out of his undercover job to help ACME on this case, but Carmen managed to capture all but one of ACME's 13 agents. Agent 13 somehow practically single-handedly stopped her and destoyed 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, helped Devineaux on this case as well, to recover 12 stolen landmarks. It was soon discovered, with further investigation, that the Prometheus Rock was being used to 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 accomplish 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 their hide-outs.

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.

See also: List of Carmen Sandiego products, List of Carmen Sandiego characters