Channel J: A Piece of Carmen Sandiego History

Yesterday on this blog, I investigated a comment I made three years ago about Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, and today I’m going to do the same about a comment I made about the sequel series, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?

“The final round required players to make their way through six time portals in 90 seconds. Each time portal required answering a question correctly with two possible answers given. Getting a question wrong meant performing a physical task to open the gate. If the player could get through all six gates, Carmen Sandiego would be captured.

It seemed to me like a sufficiently quick player would be able to get two of the questions incorrect and still capture Carmen, possibly three if they were fast enough, unlike in World where players had to get a specific number of locations correct or they wouldn’t win. Perhaps Time was developed with the promise that more players would capture Carmen, since there were many episodes of World where players lost by mere inches.”

One of the things I never brought up was that it was definitely possible that the map round could’ve been influenced by the physical fitness of the contestant.  If they just couldn’t physically get themselves to the eight locations required of them (seven in the first season), then it probably wouldn’t matter if they knew the material.  I am admittedly assuming, in my article yesterday, that most of the contestants were sufficiently equal when it came to physical capabilities.  Perhaps it was a part of the requirements that contestants be physically fit, I don’t know.

This is doubly true for today’s article because in the final round of Time, which was known as the Trail of Time, contestants had to perform a physical task if they got a history question wrong.  In theory, that means they could still win the offered prize even if they got all six questions wrong, if they were able to perform the tasks quickly enough.

In practice, contestants were never so lucky.  As far as I can recall, no one tried to game the system to give a random response as soon as they could without thinking so that they would have as much time as possible on the tasks, or if they did, it didn’t succeed.

Like yesterday, the data I’m using comes from the Carmen Sandiego Wiki, but I am unfortunately working from a much more incomplete set of data this time.  Of the 115 episodes produced, the Wiki is missing data for 19 episodes, all in season one.

The first claim I’m making is that the Trail of Time, where contestants had to answer six history questions and perform physical tasks for every incorrect answer, was designed so that they were able to give away more prizes and have more contestants capture Carmen Sandiego.  Each question had two possible answers and contestants had to choose which one they thought was correct.  If they chose the incorrect answer, they had to activate the time gate manually.

In World, the total number of trips they gave away was 87 out of 294 known episodes, giving us an approximate win rate of 29.6%.  The prize for Time was a brand new computer system “with a powerful processor” along with both physical and electronic encyclopedias in season one, and electronic only in season two, but I don’t know how the value of this prize compared to the value of the trips from World or if they were better able to afford to give these away.

In season one’s 65 episodes, of which data from 46 episodes are known, Carmen was captured 23 times.  In season two’s 50 episodes, contestants succeeded in capturing Carmen 19 times, giving us a total of 42 times in 96 known episodes.  Overall, this gives us a win rate of 43.75%  Although there is significantly less data on Time than there is on World in that there are only two seasons to draw from rather than five, it would appear that my first claim would be correct.  Season one alone had a 50% success rate, meaning that they were having to give away a significantly greater amount of computers than they were trips.

It was a good thing they gave the contestants an alternate means to get through each time gate, because accuracy was a big problem in the Trail of Time.  Of the 42 contestants who captured Carmen, only four of them got all six questions correct in season one and only three of them did so in season two.  My second claim was that players were still able to capture Carmen even with two questions incorrect, and that would indeed be the case.  30 contestants were able to capture Carmen with just five correct answers.  In fact, getting five correct seemed to still guarantee a win, because there was not a single contestant who got five correct and who didn’t manage to perform the physical task necessary to activate their failed time gate.  Five players got four correct and still captured Carmen, but there were an additional eleven who got four correct and were unable to perform the necessary tasks to activate the failed time gates.

I will claim that my statement was correct in theory, but in practice, contestants were unable to rise to the challenge, more often than not.  My third claim was that it was also theoretically possible to get three questions incorrect and still capture Carmen, but unfortunately, not a single person who got three questions incorrect were able to perform this feat.  I can’t say for certain if this makes it impossible to capture her if the contestant has to activate three gates manually, but the data suggests that I was being overly optimistic.  For all intents and purposes, it appears that four correct questions is the absolute minimum requirement to capture Carmen and win, and five questions correct guarantees a win.

On the plus side, if contestants didn’t know the answer, guessing seemed to serve them well.  Only one contestant ever scored a zero out of the 96 known episodes, and he had time to try four questions before the time limit expired.  A further five contestants scored just one question correct.  Chances are, you either knew some of the material or you were good at guessing.  It’s impossible to tell how many of the winning contestants didn’t know the answers and somehow guessed right on all six questions, of course, and I choose to assume they knew the answers.

In all, my assumptions about Time were somewhat correct.  Accurate was the perception that it was easier to win a prize on Time, but I don’t think I can claim that the rest of my perceptions were 100% correct.  I’m not going to move the goalposts and claim that I was only saying it might be possible to win with three questions correct.  Absolutely no one did, so I was incorrect.

What I will say is that the Carmen Sandiego game shows did a lot to promote knowledge of history and geography, about as much as the video games did.  Unlike, say, the You Don’t Know Jack! game show, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? translated well to television, and despite that it was an inferior product, I will admit that Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? also made for a competent game show, and actually made at least one improvement over World that I brought up in Quarantine Control #50, in that the second round actually rewarded knowledge instead of forced contestants to guess, making success a purely random outcome in World.

Of course, the franchise didn’t just consist of game shows.  Two animated shows have been produced so far, and there is even talk of a live action feature film, so Carmen Sandiego is still alive and well and promoting education.  Video games also continue to be made, and one of the games has even been added to Steam.

With how popular Carmen Sandiego continues to be, I wonder if a revival of the game shows might be feasible.  If anything, I’d love to see if contestants would be more likely to catch her now than they were back in the 1990s.