The Carmen Sandiego Franchise is Officially Cooler than Bond

If you were a fan of the Carmen Sandiego computer game in the 80s, then you know a thing or two about love and loyalty. When cooler kids played Mario Brothers, you stood by this Commodore 64 femme fatale and swore to death to never let her go.

Carmen Sandiego was a mysterious red-headed thief who stole relics from around the world, and you chased her from one capital city to the next, studying geography and cultural history along the way. The game was designed not only to entertain you but also to educate you, and therein lay the weird whodunit: it was actually fun.

But eventually love and loyalty did you wrong, and the brushstrokes of Time swept Carmen Sandiego away. By the 2000s, she was gone like a Casablanca wind.

Along Comes Netflix.

Then came word across the wires that Netflix was releasing a brand new Carmen Sandiego TV series, and nerds everywhere scoffed in unison. There was a big chance this was going to be terrible. A very big chance. In fact, it was a darned certainty.

And then the trailer dropped: