Go Ahead and Laugh.

Carmen Sandiego is hottttt.

It's 3:30 a.m. right now, my weekend has been so mentally exhausting I crashed in my 20-person seminar at 6:00 p.m. and then again at 8:00, woke up at midnight, about to go back to bed... workshop submission still not done, but I'm a little woozy and unbalanced from weird caffeine intake (or lack thereof) today. I'm so brain-dead and tired I think I'm allowed to have some weird musings.

So I was fucking around online searching for a red trench coat and fedora--no, this is not an unusual thing for me--and got to thinking: 80s cartoon shows and video game media had some strikingly strong female characters grounded in intelligence and physical/moral strength. Seems like it should be the other way around, considering nowadays a lot of cartoon-character or video game women (granted, with exceptions) seem very physically stereotyped or play weaker/secondary roles to the male lead. Too brain-dead right now to think of many concrete examples, and now that I'm trying to think I'm just slowly horrifying myself at the sheer volume of anime-esque stuff the U.S. has assimilated. I guess Kim Possible is an awesome example of a strong woman character, even though personally I never liked that she was a cheerleader--but she pulls it off well, I guess, even if it does feel a bit cookie-cutter at times.

Maybe it's just that back when I was a kid and didn't know any better, Carmen Sandiego, along with a surprising number of her female henchmen, was the epitome of original "strong woman." Also, I was secretly in love with Carmen Sandiego and have been so since the third grade. (Seriously. If she were alive, I'd go gay for her in a heartbeat.) I mean, hey, she was damncool, and she didn't need to flaunt anything to pull off her coolness. She hid her figure under the trench coat and you only saw her face a coupla times in the cartoon series. And I mean, the basic premise for her ditching for a life of crime was that she was smarter than everyone at the mostly-male-run ACME Detective Agency. Looking back on it now, I kinda remember several of her female henchmen being billed as physically stronger than a lot of the men, some of them looking bulked-up and very butch in the dossier profiles (I think this was the "Where in the World" series?) Sarah Nade, the really butch punk-rocker, or those female "strong-women" who pulled off a lot of the capers involving hard physical labor. Bustin' up stereotypes left and right, man. And this was--1983? 'S pretty cool. Especially since the model for Carmen Sandiego was Indiana Jones, who's definitely high up on the Top 10 All-Time Coolest List.

Thing is, if you think about other prominent female characters of the time (and were there even that many...?) Daphne from "Scooby Doo" was very much the "delicate female," but Velma was very much the nerd so maybe that balanced out. Daphne very rarely participated in any of the conflict resolution, though, if I remember right... Judy Jetson in "The Jetsons" also just kinda seemed to be there as the random teenage girl character, though I didn't follow that religiously so I can't really say. Jessie from "The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest" later on is more the modern female, with an average bust and the same build as Jonny, but she tends to wear a lot of pastels and never puts her hair up even for the stickiest situations, though that might just be me being nit-picky.

Same for male chars, too--even the guys nowadays are sometimes stereotyped as super-macho or super-dorky. Again, floundering for concrete examples. I'll have to get back to this. But what happened to the more thoughtful or liberal or original/unique characters with a little bit of personality behind them? Back then emphasis wasn't so much on breast size or clothing style or ditziness or machoness; it took a little more to make a good character. Carmen and her henchwomen rocked the liberal/feminist agenda back then; Zack and Ivy weren't half-bad either. Jonny Quest (and I do mean the original 1986 one, although the Real Adventures wasn't so bad, and Jessie rocked) had a pretty good balance of physical/mental capability. Fuck, even "Captain Planet" had that one episode where Wheeler picks up a whore in New Orleans at Mardi Gras, and Linka goes off in a tizzy. But "Captain Planet" was chockful of overt stereotypes--Wheeler the apathetic, insensitive American for one, and Linka's reactions to his advances (she could be a bitch, but she acted like she liked it). Gadget in "Rescue Rangers" was pretty cool, but she got thrown into the distressed-damsel role way too many times. And speaking of Gadget, Penny in "Inspector Gadget" was awesome--a girl and a kid who pretty much solved most of the crimes going on and let Gadget take the credit. How cool is that?? And Punky Brewster... is annoying as fuck in retrospect, but I guess she did have her own thing going on.

And of course, before I get severely flamed, She-Ra was the coolest EV4H.

Of course, in terms of characters anyway, the 80s and before had a lot to apologize for. "Captain N"? That Ruby Spears Megaman cartoon? Super Mario? That Zelda spinoff? Okay, I admit to having watched all three out of sheer little-kid fandom, but Jesus H. Christ were they bad, bad enough that I knew they were bad at the time. But seriously, people. I miss those strong characters. In fact, I'll have to come back to this thought when I'm a little more rested and coherent.

Anyway. Carmen Sandiego is hot :-)