Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego Part Six

Welcome back to another look at the Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? cartoon, a series that has so far attempted to show a person with a ridiculous amount of personal wealth steal things to contact aliens, make a custom painting, grow her own pet dinosaur, and put her likeness on the moon.  ...now, to be fair, that painting one does seem rather tame next to the others, but they can't all be completely outlandish crimes, right?

So let's just jump straight into this next episode, which left me with a strange moral dilemma:  Should Carmen have been allowed to get away with it?

Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego Part Five

I've been trying to think of the biggest things I always love about over the top cartoon series is the fact that there's always so much wealth bouncing around, even as a child I always wondered why the bad guys would even try to steal anything else.

Let's look at Carmen Sandiego's crew.  They have blimps, hover technology, devices that could possibly splice together DNA to create a dinosaur.  They have technology that allows them to steal a multi-acre satellite dish and transport it around the world.

Obviously, she's not hurting in terms of wealth.  They're also not the only ones.  You have gangs and crime syndicates running around with better technology than most people in the world do, and yet they seem to have really pedestrian goals.

For instance, take every single villain in Scooby Doo.  They spend an elaborate amount of money building fake pirate ships, tunneling out under castles, and designing elaborate castles to get a few thousand dollars worth of gems from an old lady's wall or because they want to buy out an amusement park.

You have groups like the Misfits, a rival rock band to Jem and the Holograms who at one point had a fully functional time machine.  What did they do with it?  Try to kill off the good guys and become the world's best rock band, of course.  I mean, what could you possibly think of doing with a time machine?

At least with Carmen, though, you know it's about the challenge.  Sure she's already wealthy beyond anybody's wildest dreams and has technology that makes S.H.I.E.L.D. envious...but hey, if she managed to get away with stealing the Statue of Liberty, then man, that would be something that would go down in history.

So let's get into today's episode, where Carmen attempts to steal, I kid you not, the moon.

Right off the bat this is my favorite episode.

Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego Part Four

I find it interesting that some things really push my buttons but others don't.  Watching a "crime scene" drama, I'll frequently get frustrated and call the show out for how ridiculous it can become.  I think the defining moment in my opinion of them when the "perky goth girl" that everybody but me apparently finds to be the hottest woman to ever be on television was fighting off a hacker attack...and so another agent joined her on the same keyboard.

Then again, NCIS tends to win for "stupidest moments involving technology" such as the woman who had "every high score" on every MMORPG (cause, y'know, all video games have high scores, right?).

And that's not even getting into the plots of these shows.  I used to watch Law & Order: SVU until they decided that every single story had to resolve the crime quickly so they could get into some kind of political drama.

"Hey, we think this person shot the victim because he's anti-abortion and she was pro-choice."

"Great, now let's discuss the woman's right to choose for forty-five minutes, because as cops we have nothing else to do."

"Wait, are you sure there isn't something in a headline somewhere we can blow up to a ridiculous extreme first?"

Plus, the crimes are often ridiculous to the point of almost being a satire of actual crime, which begs the question:

"How is it so many series about people stealing or murdering people drives me bananas, but a show about a woman who steals a multi-acre satellite dish just makes me smile in glee?"

Let's look at that as we dig into the newest episode.

Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego Part Three

Several weeks after my look at the first episode, we're finally back on track with our look at the first batch of episodes from Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?

Let's just jump right in.

Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego Part Two

We're now into our look at the first episode of Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego, a franchise that I honestly wouldn't mind becoming a live action series or even a series of movies.  I don't know who you could get to play Carmen Sandiego herself, but since the character doesn't really show up until the end, it would make casting rather interesting.

So let's get into the first episode, "The Stolen Smile."

Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego Part One

While I love the cartoon show Mighty Max, I hit a good temporary stopping point.  They wrapped up their first major plot point, we saw Max grow as a hero, and I think that actually was the final episode of season one.  

So, where to go from here? 

Honestly, I made a list, numbered it, and then had a random number generator pick.  It could just as easily have been another season of My Little Pony, another look at Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills, a peek into history with Liberty Kids, or even digging into something a bit more Japanese.

Heck, I had Totally Spies on that list, because I'm willing to cut any show with Jennifer Hale playing a secret agent some slack.

What it did land on was my DVD containing four episodes of Where On Earth Is Carmen Sandiego, and I'm pretty excited by this.  I've already said before that Carmen Sandiego is, in my eyes, the most interesting woman in video game history simply because we knew nothing about her.  She was the world's greatest thief, she had a love of red trenchcoats and awesome red hats, and she could steal anything that wasn't nailed down and pretty much anything that was.  Heck, she stole entire rivers and the entire city of Casablanca.

She doesn't mess around.  The Hope Diamond is for rookies.

So let's look back at the program, starting with a brief introductory reminder of the fact that there used to be two programs based around the world's greatest thief.