Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

I spent 5 good years of my life wondering in fact where in the world was Carmen Sandiego. She certainly was a tricky one. To think that there existed a jewel thief manager who could outwit three red-vested 10-to-14-year-old contestants with limited geographic knowledge is absolutely staggering. Even though Carmen and her cohorts were non-threateningly cartoon-animated, we knew of her malevolent misdoings and were eager to locate her and her dim-witted agents. Plus, the victor won an all-expenses paid trip to anywhere in the 48 contiguous United States. I mean, imagine! A chance to fly Delta Airlines coach and stay in a Holiday Inn down in downtown Boise or inner Salt Lake City? Sign me up!

If you grew up in the 1990s and had a head, the Carmen Sandiego game show theme song was likely stuck in it and playing on repeat. Performed by Rockapella, the leading Folger's coffee commercial-starring a capella quartet of the era, the song was possibly the most captivating and recognizable game-show theme of the decade. Just hearing the opening, "do it, Rockapella!" is enough to mobilize me to doo-wop uncontrollably. In case you've ever managed to expunge this catchy chorus from your brain, here is a handy sing-along video of the song:



The show itself was developed as a response to the alarmingly low level of geographic knowledge amongst America's television-polluted youth. They were already watching TV, so why not throw in some desperately-needed geography lessons? Oldest trick in the PBS play book, presented by Viewers Like You. After all, we couldn't have the Soviets out-knowledging us in the field of maps and atlases--especially considering that when the show first aired, a disturbing number of American-educated children could not even locate the as-of-yet-undefunct Soviet Union on a map.

Once they'd hooked you with the rockin' theme song, they capitalized on your love for Rockapella by featuring them as the "house vocal band and comedy troupe". Really, that's how they were billed. Admittedly, this is probably the highest level to which a moderately humorous a capella group could aspire, but its music scene street credibility is definitely questionable. Rockapella's zany madcap skits paired with Carmen and the gang's animated hijinks were enough to make all of us yearn to be game show gumshoes.

Most episodes began a little something like this, minus the special celebrity teammates:



All hail the late great Lynn Thigpen, chief of the ACME detective agency and our hearts. Along with co-host Greg Lee ("The ACME Special Agent in charge of training new recruits,") they somehow made these off-the-wall tasks and missions seem appreciably plausible. Why shouldn't we believe that all great detectives are given detailed briefings chock-full of historically and geographically relevant educational information with little to no information on the case or suspects themselves? Who were we to question the notion that gumshoes typically solve their crimes in three well-defined rounds culminating in a light-speed map identification quest? We could only assume that all failed detectives usually walk away from their task at hand dejected but sporting a t-shirt with the head crook's name and face plastered across the front. You know, in case they run into them somewhere and need the pictorial evidence to make a legitimate citizen's arrest.

Makes sense to me.

Of course we all knew the premise was thin and the musical comedy sketches unnecessary, but we loved this show with undying fervor nonetheless. At the time, the prizes seemed outstandingly desirable, but in retrospect it becomes pretty clear we were working with a public broadcasting budget. Sure, the winner got to keep their Crime Bucks (conveniently converted to legal tender cash!) but the other consolatory prizes seemed a little "let's clean out the ol' PBS donation closet." Though the nature and value of the consolation prizes remained relatively stagnant, the show did a spectacular job of repackaging the prize pack with a new name each season. Originally the ACME Crimenet Travel Kit, it also went by the aliases of the Travel Pack and ACME Gumshoe Gear. Clearly, it was not only our jewel thieves who were duplicitous.

No matter what you called it, if you failed to win the coveted round-trip ticket to a Holiday Inn anywhere in the lower 48 states you were still going home with...well, something. Just think, you too could win a Rand McNally World Atlas, Official Carmen Sandiego t-shirt, watch, sweatshirt, backpack, a one year full-paid subscription to National Geographic, a BASKETBALL GLOBE (!), ACME crime net cap, ACME stealth pen recorder, and even maybe the ACME Voice Identification Badge and Leave-a-Message Wallet! That's a lot of loot right there. To think we thought the jewel-heisters were thieves!

Carmen Sandiego was a phenomenon in a way that few children's shows are today. We all knew that it was educational; the secret was out. Yet somehow, we got so caught up in the catchy Rockapella-ness of it all and were willing to accept this opportunity to actively learn something about world geography. Exceptionally timely in an era of ever-changing geo-political boundaries, we could always count on Carmen Sandiego to go to somewhere particularly relevant to present conflict and shifts.

At the end of the day, whether or not our postcard records of that episode's loots and locations were chosen for the at-home viewer T-shirt winner, at least the show had given us the attention span necessary to follow Carmen from Chicago to Czechoslovakia and back*.

(*All geographical data is current as of the date this program was recorded)

Lamb Chop's Play Along

For children of the 90s, a lamb chop was more than just a tasty cut of meat. It (well, she) was also a fluffy little sheep puppet who, along with an afro-ed Shari Lewis and her delightful puppet barnyard peers, entertained us through the magic of once-worthwhile public television.

A brief (read: lazy) investigation into Lamb Chop's history reveals a frightening amount of spare time amongst pop-culture Wikipedia updaters. The "Lamb Chop's Play-Along" entry actually links to a categorical page entitled "fictional sheep". Yes, really. Fictional sheep. Our esteemed lamb puppet pal was obviously in good company. In case you were wondering (which no doubt you were!), the Wikipedia entry opens with the compelling phrase,"this is a list of fictional sheep". It then goes on to list more than thirty fictional sheep.

You may be saying to yourself, what is a person who diligently maintains a blog devoted to frivolous 90s novelties doing mocking a harmless list composed by loving devotees? Certainly even she recognizes her hypocrisy.

You would be wrong.

Other fictional sheep aside, the true star was Lamb Chop. The pure cuteness of her very being was almost overwhelming. She was adorable incarnate. She was sassy and fun. She was an innocent little sock puppet we could all look up to. And her name was Lamb Chop. Come on. What sort of stone-hearted scrooge could deny the inherent cuteness?

Lamb Chop's Play-Along featured a puppet-packed roster of barnyard friends, all voiced by Shari Lewis. I present to you our painfully adorable cast of characters:

1. Charlie Horse--sometime trouble-maker, full time horse. Stirs stuff up a lot. Goofy bucktoothed expression. Pictured above wearing unecessary puppet visor.

2. Hush Puppy--all-around good guy. Floppy ears. Pictured above in superhero style t-shirt handy for moments when he forgets his initials.

3. Lambchop--feisty, adventurous, child-like. Pictured above in trendsetting Blossom-style hat.

So there you have it. There was, however, one more aspect of Lamb Chop's Play-Along that really spoke to me as a child.

Let me set up a moment for you here: as a child, I had no puppets to look up to, or at least not as religious role models. I know what you're thinking, "but all children deserve religious puppet role models!" I wholeheartedly agree. It's essentially a basic human right. The television puppets I knew and loved were always putting on low-budget remakes of "A Christmas Carol" and reveling in their non-inclusive brand of seasonal cheer. Sure, the Muppets were nice, but where was I in their puppet Christmas merrymaking? My house had no wreaths, no tree, no mistletoe. No one ever seemed to ventriloquilize anything for children like me.

Enter Shari Lewis, oh great Semitic puppetmistress. For God's sake, her father was a founding member of Yeshiva University. Did I mention he was a magician? Shari's magical Jewish upbringing set the stage for high-quality yid-centric children's entertainment. Finally, a sock-puppet horse playing Dreidel! A fuzzy-dummy dog throwing a surprise Passover Seder for the whole gang! A lamb-likeness waxing poetic on the virtues of crispy potato latkes! If nothing else, Shari Lewis and Co made me feel, if only for a few episodes, as if I belonged. No longer was I an outsider to puppet holiday celebrations! A great children's television show injustice had been overturned, or at least in the eyes of me and my Jewish day school peers.

Jewish Holiday specials or not, Lamb Chop was beloved by children worldwide. Her sweet innocence and fluffy exterior captured our hearts and planted us firmly in front of our television sets for 3 enchanting seasons. Even after Lewis's untimely and tragic death, her impact on children of the 90s lives on. After all, she taught us how to endlessly (really, endlessly) irritate our parents with a catchy little ditty entitled "This is the Song that Never Ends."

It goes a little something like this:

This is the song that never ends,
it just goes on and on my friends
Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was,
and they'll continue singing it forever just because...

This is the song that never ends...

Oh, how parents hated this song! It was right up there with "I Know a Song that Gets on Everybody's Nerves". To Lewis's credit, however, the song was quite memorable and played at the end of every episode. She even made a big show about trying to get them to stop, prescient of our parent's subsequent woeful attempts to end our insistent singing.

Even once we had outwitted the lyrics and could start singing it once we actually knew what it was, we would always continue singing it forever.

You know, just because.

Bop It

Bop it!




Twist it!





Pull it!




Bop it!

Twist it!

Pull it!


Bop it!
Twist it!
Pull it!

Bopit!Twistit!Pullit!

Bop it was endless hours of fun. Well, endless hours of preoccupation. Okay, maybe just endless hours sacrificed to almighty commander, Bop it.

In the 1990s, parents, teachers, and toy-makers must have sat down and had a meeting. "Kids just aren't obedient enough," the adults probably lamented. "They're always going outside to play and they refuse to sit still and obey our persistent two-word-followed-by-exclamation-point commands."

How could we solve this conundrum of noncompliance?

Bop it.

The notion that the original toy, featuring only three functions, could hold the attention span of an eight-year old is a somewhat baffling one. The toy was essentially the at-home version of the doctor's office knee-jerk reflex test. A small audio system embedded within an oblong piece of plastic would issue forceful, pleasantry-free commands instructing the player on which function to manipulate.

"Bop it!" the machine would urge. And we would comply, locating the bop-centric button and bopping accordingly.

"Twist it!" the contraption would prompt. And so we diligently twisted, maneuvering the crank.

"Pull it!" the device would insist. And so we pulled, slightly dislocating the handle on the opposite side.

That was it. I mean, that was it. The entire toy. Sure, it started slow and gradually built speed in its commands, but that was the whole shebang. If nothing else, Bop it taught the wrenching pains of stress and mounting pressure to perform onto young, unsuspecting children. Our hearts would beat quickly, our blood pressure would soar; to examine our physiological response you would think that we were experiencing extreme anxiety over a big boardroom presentation or an impending job promotion.

Like its similarly (though slightly more enthusiastically) titled 90s toy cousin, the Skip it!, the main objective that kept us sadistically coming back for more was the personal best scoring function. On an aside, it seems that at this time, Hasbro's marketing team was padded with semi-literate foreigners with a limited vocabulary and a penchant for profuse punctuation. Let us briefly envision a marketing meeting at Hasbro in the 1990s:

Marketing Director: Alright people, we've got two new toys to name.
Team Member: What do they do?"
MD: Well, one you have to bop and the other you have to skip.
TM: Great, we've got our first words. Could we possibly identify them by definitive, meaningful pronouns?
MD: No, no, I think we should go with "it". Gender neutral, flexible meaning. The feminists will go wild for it.
TM: Okay, so can we leave it at that? Bop it and Skip it?
MD: It seems to lack a certain pizazz...it needs some punctuation to punch it up a bit.
TM 1: Question Mark?
TM 2: Semi Colon?
TM 3: Ellipse?
MD: We're not quite there...
TM 4: Exclamation Mark? But only for the Skip it, let's not push our luck.
MD: Bingo! Team member 4, you've been promoted to head of the Hasbro toy naming department. Ingenious!

But again, I digress. Bop it may have been simple and exclamation-point-free, but it did have a certain charm. It was endlessly frustrating in an encouraging, self-improving way. Bop it (at least the early, non-sellout model) was refreshingly simple and required a great deal of concentration. This was Simon for the colorblind, whack-a-mole for the vegetarians. For every 10 points a player earned, Bop it would give you a congratulatory burst of audio and bragging rights to lightning-quick albeit unnecessary reflexes. The Bop it knew better than to let us become big-headed from our victories, though. For every mistake, the Bop it would cackle maniacally at your general ineptness. It was certainly humbling, if a little cruel.

Of course, as our generation evolved into miniature multi-taskers, so too did the Bop it evolve and betray its original design and develop into a more mature "extreme" version of itself.





Though not completely true to tradition, the Bop it Extreme had its high points. Just imagine, now you could also spin it! And flick it! How did they ever achieve this brilliant feat of engineering?

In a crazy twist of toy-naming fate, Hasbro's latest rendering of the Bop it toy (scheduled for a 2009 release) is a throwback to the Hasbro of the 90s and their distinct brand of earnestness and zeal that so defined their work. The new 2009 version of the Bop it will be called...

Wait for it...

Wait for it...

BOP IT!

With an exclamation point.

Sorry Marketing Team Member 4.

You're fired.