Trivia / Carmen Sandiego

For the 2019 animated show:

• Acting for Two: Liam O'Brien voices both Vlad and Boris (collectively the Cleaners), as well as Professor Maelstrom.
• Actor-Shared Background:
  • Ivy and Zack are Bostonians and appropriately enough, their actors Abby Trott and Michael Hawley were born in Massachusetts.
  • Player is Canadian, like his voice actor Finn Wolfhard.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Ivy gets to sing karaoke in season 2, showing off Abby Trott's natural singing talent.
  • Pretty much every voice actor gets a chance to show off in the bonus clip from "To Steal Or Not To Steal", covering the Rockapella theme from Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego
• Cross-Dressing Voices: In the Japanese dub, Mitsuki Saiga voices Player.
• Directed by Cast Member: In the Latin American Spanish dub, Rodrigo Carralero is the ADR director as well as the voice of Le Chevre.
• Fake Nationality:
  • Canadian Rafael Petardi voices the French detective Chase Devineaux. Although he is originally from Montreal.
  • Brazilian-American Bernardo De Paula as the French spy Le Chevre.
  • Canadian Andrew Pifko also plays the Spanish spy El Topo.
  • Charlet Chung, an American of Japanese and Korean descent, plays the British-Chinese agent Julia Argent.
  • Roundabout works for the British Secret Service and has Asian features but is voiced by a white Canadian actor, Trevor Devall.
• International Coproduction: The show was a co-production between Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (United States) and DHX Media (Canada), with animation split between DHX, Chromosphere (also in the United States) and Top Draw (Philippines, seasons 1 and 2 only).
• Meaningful Release Date:
  • This series debuted its first two seasons during 2019, which was both the 25th anniversary year of the premiere of Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? and (as mentioned below) the 20th anniversary of the finale of Where On Earth?.
  • The Halloween and mask-themed third season debuted on October 1, 2020.
• Predecessor Casting Gag: While escaping V.I.L.E. Island, Carmen has an encounter in the second episode with V.I.L.E.'s bookkeeper, voiced by Rita Moreno, who voices Carmen in the 1990s series. Carmen even steals her trademark outfit from the woman.
• Promoted Fanboy: Gina Rodriguez used to watch Where In The World? as a child. She was also a fan of Rita Moreno and knew of her portrayal of Carmen on Where on Earth?. Gina now voices Carmen herself in the Netflix series, she mentions in the foreword of Who in the World is Carmen Sandiego? she actually started crying when approached for the role.
• Referenced by...: Animaniacs (2020) referenced the show during their song about reboots.
• Sequel Gap: The previous installment in the franchise ended in 1999, 20 years prior to the premiere of this one.
• What Could Have Been: These posts shows a few of the characters and what their initial designs could've been.

For the franchise in general:

• Executive Meddling: The spin-off series like Word Detective and Math Detective only really took off when a complex series of transactions brought Carmen Sandiego to a new owner.^note So Brøderbund Software (owner of Carmen Sandiego) and Soft Key (a Canadian CD collection manufacturer) were bidding on The Learning Company (which owned MECC, creators of The Oregon Trail). Soft Key won and changed its name to The Learning Company Inc. (the original had no "Inc."). This happened in 1995. In 1998, The Learning Company Inc. acquired Brøderbund. In 1999, Mattel acquired The Learning Company, but they lost money, probably from making too many Carmen Sandiego spin-off titles. Then it was sold again to a new owner...
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: There is an obscure early Carmen Sandiego game that's focused on the State of North Dakota called Where in North Dakota Is Carmen Sandiego? It was put together by a team of North Dakota educators and programmers to test the waters for how well a state-based game could do; while the game did ultimately sell reasonably well, it was the only one of its kind ever made, and naturally was made in such a limited amount of quantities that it became a very hot collector's item as the years went on. This was helped in no small part to the sheer bizarreness of the concept coupled with how it became an elusive game over the years due to how much obscurity it fell into. Have a look here and here. Luckily, the game has since been digitally archived.
• Missing Episode: The weekly serial games that were made exclusively for the Prodigy Interactive online service; Outside of several screenshots, there's currently no way to access any of them.
• No Export for You: There was a Nintendo DS game named Mais où se cache Carmen Sandiego? Mystère au bout du monde. ^translation Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Mystery at the End of the World. It was released in Europe and Australia in 2009, and even though the ESRB had rated the game (and subsequently yanked said rating when it got accidentally leaked), it never got an American release. Less than favorable reviews, like this one, most likely killed any chance of a North American release.
  • Japan had their own exclusive game with Carmen Sandiego in Japan for the PC-98.
• Sleeper Hit: The very first game in the series only sold moderately okay on release, and wasn't as big of a seller as Broderbund's other titles at that time. However, over the next several years the series would catch on more, especially thanks to teachers utilizing them in the classrooms. By the time Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? came out four years later, it sold out so quickly that Broderbund had to order an emergency second printing within two months, something the company never had to do that soon for a title at that point.
• What Could Have Been:
  • There were rumors of Sandra Bullock starring in a potential Carmen Sandiego movie around the late 1990s.
  • In 2011 Walden Media bought film rights for the franchise, with Jennifer Lopez reportedly attached; News of it fizzled out shortly after, however.

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