Chicago to Czechoslovakia… and back!
If I’m ever striking up a conversation with someone about underrated game shows (which sounds like a totally valid conversation topic to me…), there’s a very good chance that I’ll be mentioning the legendary 90s children’s game show, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
This show had it all - mystery, geography, trivia, animated hijinks… and best of all, fantastic music. It contained the perfect mix of ingredients to keep a dorky little preteen like myself hooked.
In looking back at the weird and wonderful legacy of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? through a data lens, there were two areas I was curious to dive into - its amazingly fun geographic theme song and its absolutely epic and chaotic final round. Let’s start first with the theme song.
There are many great television theme songs that I will gladly belt out at any chance I get. But alas, this show’s theme song is the one tune that I am always eager to belt out more loudly and enthusiastically than just about any other. Rockapella fans, I know you’re with me on this one - this theme is unmatched! In fact, if you haven’t heard it (or if you haven’t heard it recently), I hereby grant you license to take two minutes and thirty-five seconds out of your day right now to go listen to it. Ready… set… go:
What I was curious to look at more closely as it related to this wonderful bop of a theme song was what particular locations and geographic regions were mentioned most often in the song’s lyrics. For a show whose focus was on world geography, did they balance representation of cities and countries across each of each of the seven continents? Or did it fall into the trap of being overly U.S.-centric in its references?
The graph shown at the top of this page gives the full data for anyone who wants to dive in along with me. In summary, what I found was:
While North America did come out on top as the most-represented of the seven continents, it was only by a tiny margin - it had only 0.5* more references than the continent that ended up in second place, Asia. (*How can there be “half credit,” you may ask? One geographic location in the theme song, the Red Sea, lies between Asia and Africa - so its attribution is split 50/50 between these two continents.)
North America’s eight references were closely followed by seven-and-a-half for Asia and seven for Europe - a pretty close race across these top three continents!
Africa, despite being the second most populous continent in the world, had just three and a half references in the song (other than the Red Sea, all of the references for Africa were for countries - there were no mentions of cities or other geographic features).
Over the course of the song, all seven continents do get mentioned - yes, even Antarctica gets its one reference.
Now a little trivia for you fellow Carmen Sandiego theme song enthusiasts. Without looking back again at the graph above, can you name:
What are the only two U.S. states featured in the lyrics to the song?
Other than the Red Sea, what is the only other body of water featured in the song (hint: it is a river)?
What is the only North American country whose name is featured in the song?
Highlight to see the answers: 1) Ohio & Arkansas, 2) Mekong (River), 3) Belize
Rockapella was a core part of the show’s DNA, also performing musical interludes, sound effects, and background music throughout the entire show.
In addition to the energy that the show’s theme song and its Rockapella-infused musical stings brought to the series, the game dynamics themselves were also quite solid. The show, which recorded a total of 295 episodes over the course of its five seasons, consisted of three young contestants per episode tasked with competing in a series of trivia rounds. Their goal throughout these rounds was to determine the location of one of Carmen’s crooks, and ultimately where Carmen is located. One contestant is eliminated per round, leaving just one contestant (or “gumshoe” as the show would call them) to compete in the final round.
For anyone who doesn’t remember, the final round was exciting but also… anxiety-inducing! The basic jist of the final round was that the gumshoe first wrote down their choice of what destination they wanted to take a trip to if they were to end up winning the round (more on that later). Then, in order to officially “capture Carmen,” the gumshoe must correctly identify seven locations (eight, from season two onward) across a map of one of the world’s continents by running around and correctly placing markers on a giant map in under forty-five seconds. Here’s a clip of the fast-paced final round (otherwise known as the “Bonus Round”) in action:
The final round also produced a wealth of data that can be analyzed, much to my own personal delight. Across the show’s 295 episodes, crowd-sourced data on the outcomes of the final round exist for 294 of those episodes (if anyone can help me find the missing data for the lost episode “Racquet Rocket,” you’ll be my new hero!).
Here’s a breakdown of the data I looked at specifically pertaining to the show’s final round:
So, what do we take away from all of this? There were a few key questions I was hoping to answer through this data:
The first question I had been hoping to answer with this data was: Just how hard WAS that final round? To me as a young viewer, it always seemed like the gumshoes were unsuccessful more often than not. And it turns out, I was right - a mere 30% of total gumshoes over the show’s five seasons won that final round and earned the opportunity to take a trip to their chosen prize destination.
I was also curious to understand which continent’s map appeared most often in the show’s final round - was it truly a random distribution? In fact, North America / U.S. appeared the most often at 26% of the time (Note: Seasons 1-2 featured a U.S. map, whereas seasons 3-5 featured a North America map - they have been combined together for this overall statistic). South America got the least amount of love out of all the continents, appearing only 13% of the time. (Unsurprisingly, Australia and Antarctica were not featured in the final round, as the focus was around continents that had multiple countries within them for the gumshoes to identify).
The continent map with the highest and lowest win rate was also of interest to me - growing up, I recall vividly that the gumshoes always seemed to struggle the most with their African geography. This gut feeling ended up being supported by the data - Africa had the lowest win rate with only 19% of gumshoes winning the final round if Africa was their assigned continent. North America, then followed by South America, came out on top, with win rates of 42% and 38%, respectively.
There were also some changes made across the seasons that I was interested in seeing the impact of. Starting from season 2 onward, the rules changed slightly and gumshoes now had to identify eight locations correctly (instead of seven) to take home the big prize. Additionally, as noted earlier, starting in season 3, the U.S. map was replaced with a map of all of North America. My initial hypothesis was that I would expect these changes to have led to progressively lower win rates as the show’s seasons went on - but as you can see, the opposite happened! The win rates steadily increased across the first four seasons (before dipping down slightly in season five), with season four having the highest win rate. My revised hypothesis here is that, as the show stayed on the air for longer and contestants increasingly knew what to expect, the win rates trended upwards - even in spite of some of the above-mentioned changes that were likely put in place by production to help keep the win rates under control.
Finally, I also wanted to look at data around the actual destination prize locations for the gumshoes who did win. Note that the location data was ONLY available for the 87 gumshoes over the show’s history that actually won the final round - the show didn’t reveal the location selections for those gumshoes that didn’t win. It’s also worth noting that the trip location options changed slightly between the seasons - in season 1, the gumshoes were able to select anywhere in the contiguous 48 states, but in season 2 onward, this was expanded to be anywhere in North America (except for Hawaii). The prize location selected most often by trip winners was California, with a sizable 22% of contestants choosing it. Mexico at 15% and Florida at 14% were next in the list of most commonly-selected destinations. The most plausible explanation for this California-heavy skew? Most of the show’s contestants were pulled from New York school districts, so many of them were eager to head far across the country for their prize selection. Only one winning gumshoe from across the show’s five seasons chose to go to New York for their trip.
Overall, my takeaways from all this data on the show’s final round are that: 1) No, I wasn’t misremembering that this show’s final round was HARD (maybe that’s why it was so exciting?!?), 2) African geography isn’t the biggest strength of our school systems, and 3) New York kids really love California. My other takeaway is that, although that final round would have kicked my butt if I had ever gotten to appear on this show as a kid, I still keep telling myself that I somehow could have defeated it.
As I wrap up this salute to Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and some of the data behind it, let me just leave one final thought here: In a world of constant reboots, I wouldn’t mind seeing this fantastic game show grace our TV screens once again someday…
My own take on Carmen Sandiego, circa Halloween 2011 (twenty years after the premiere of the original game show!)