Not having access to Netflix means I haven’t seen their new take on Carmen Sandiego, the master thief of the Broderbund Software video game series and other spin-offs. You may recall from the trailer that I had a few problems with the plot we were given, and I hear that the show may be fairly decent but just as poor an adaptation as I expected. The thing is not only can you do a proper translation of the games, they already did.
For those not in the know, the Carmen Sandiego game franchise, and every other medium it’s been translated to I’m aware of, has the player (or their stand-in) playing an agent for ACME Detective Agency (or “Crimenet” in the game shows). Your mission: track down Carmen Sandiego and her henchman in the organization V.I.L.E. (Villain’s International League of Evil). As a more comedic game, Carmen and her crew have managed to steal the Eiffel Tower, The Statue Of Liberty, “Brahms’s Lullaby”, and all sorts of weird items around the US, the World, and even time itself. While there are different reasons given in various series in just the video games alone, my favorite is that Carmen was a former ACME agent who deciding thievery was more challenging, and like Batman foe the Riddler would leave clues to make the “game” more fair. Her agents are a bit quirky with the names to show for it, possibly codenames tied to their skills or gimmick.
The new incarnation has Carmen stealing things to stop V.I.L.E. from getting to them first, with the ACME agents trying to stop both of them. Two of her partners in crimefighting-through-crime are Zack and Ivy, and that is the polar opposite of everything in the franchise. Zack and his big sister Ivy are supposed to be ACME agents, first introduced in Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego, a show that is much more faithful to the video game series and a great show on its own. It’s like they took a plot and slapped Carmen iconography on it. Although there is no licensed posting of the show available I want to show you how to do adapt this game properly, plus it’s just a really good show, airing on Fox Kids from 1994-1999, produced by DIC Entertainment (now owned by Media DHX when they took over Cookie Jar Entertainment, which bought DIC’s library). THIS is how you translate Carmen Sandiego.
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