Vidding Stuff

fanworks, a convention this summer in Detroit that seems to be partially intended as a spiritual successor to vividcon and partially as a convention for all sorts of fanworks creators, just opened registration. It conflicts with Worldcon, so I won't be going this year, but I bought a Digital membership, which will give streaming access to the vidshows, and registers my support for the endeavor.


viddingnews started a few weeks ago as a vidding newsletter and is a welcome addition to the community.


I just finished drafts of two vids, a vid for the new Carmen Sandiego show and an MCU vid. I'm likely to finish and post the MCU vid this week; the Carmen Sandiego vid I might hold back and submit to vidukon_cardiff.


I've also been thinking about vidbigbang. I have mostly failed at my attempt to vid the Goldberg Variations- I managed two variations and about three minutes of timeline before I ran out of steam. I think the general lesson is that something that big can't be fumbled through. I need to have a clear structure and plan for the whole thing. I have a new VBB idea for next year for the Terminator series, a set of paired Skynet and John Connor vids. For the Skynet vid I think I want to connect Skynet to the history of computing technology, so I've been gathering video of ENIAC and other early computers and video of the evolution of semiconductor hardware production.

Netflix Carmen Sandiego

Being in the throes of a ton of Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego feels from festivids, I eagerly consumed the new Carmen Sandiego.


Its premise is to try to fashion Carmen, historically often something of an ambiguous villain (in the vein of the Riddler, where it's not clear that she actually wants to get away with her crimes, and it's not clear if she has any malice at heart), into an anti-hero. Carmen is reimagined as a vigilante thief, orphaned and raised at the VILE academy until she realizes that theft comes at a human cost, and she thereupon rebelled. Since then, she teams with the resourceful Bostonian thieves Zach and Ivy (omg the accents!) and the mysterious white hat hacker known as Player to steal stolen treasures back from VILE and return them to their 'rightful' owners.

It is... not exactly the premise I thought we were being sold. Pre-release conversation that I heard centered on the image of Carmen as a Latina revolutionary whose acts of theft were efforts to combat European hegemony and cultural appropriation, Robin Hood for the colonized. But this is a weak subthread of the series and one that wasn't well supported by the facts. Carmen's origin story as an orphan raised on an island of criminals weakens to the point of non-existence her connection to her colonized heritage, and VILE as the antagonist is the kind of corporate bait and switch we're used to on television where the use of an explicitly evil antagonist obfuscates the fact that the same crime is perpetuated routinely by generally well-meaning people. You know, like how Marvel didn't use actual Nazis as the villains for Captain America, but used 'HYDRA' instead, and how it rendered a lot of the films' messages incoherent or problematic. The true face of culture theft is not mustache twirling supervillains, it's apparently-well-meaning liberals...

Carmen's Road to Damascus moment comes when a teenaged Carmen is in Casablanca trying to follow VILE for personal reasons and a Moroccan archaeologist explains the concept of national treasures to her. Which is such a white savior premise that it barely moves the needle for me that she is Latina. And rather than, you know, steal back the Elgin Marble for Greece, or return Iraqi antiquities looted during the Gulf Wars, she's re-stealing national treasures stolen from museums by the explicitly evil VILE and returning them to those museums without interrogating the idea of museums. If this version of Carmen Sandiego is in fact about the moral complexities of fighting cultural appropriation, it is not very good at it. The closest we get to an acknowledgment of cultural hegemony is the Ecuador episode, where Carmen and a VILE criminal are engaged in a race to recover a culturally valuable historical coin from a shipwreck- Carmen, so she can give it to an Ecuadorian archaeologist; the VILE criminal so they can give it to their bosses to sell on the black market. But again, this does not grapple with cultural hegemony or appropriation in any serious or thoughtful way; VILE as an entity shifts focus away from the real problems of colonialist looting.

Instead we get Leverage-style heists against VILE while she is pursued by a Sterling-meets-Clousseau ACME detective named Chase Devineaux who is convinced Carmen is just a thief no matter how many times his partner points out that she seems to be helping them out. Which is fun enough! I love Leverage, I love Carmen Sandiego as a character, but... if the idea is that Carmen is opposing kyriarchy, Carmen SHOULD be just a thief in the eyes of the law. Validation from ACME would actually undermine her character role. Notably, the Ecuador episode is one of the only episodes where ACME's storyline does not involve chasing Carmen. Because it's the only episode where Carmen's restorative justice does not involve giving the paintings back to a legally determined 'rightful owner' but rather to a morally determined 'rightful owner', ACME has no place in the story.

ACME is literally described in the show as a law enforcement/surveillance agency EVEN MORE SECRETIVE THAN VILE. ACME is committed to the preservation of everything that is wrong with Western Civilization. ACME cares nothing about jurisdiction, nothing about rule of law, and everything about the exercise of hierarchical power and maintenance of the status quo. ACME in this rendition is a terrifying concept that Carmen should be just as opposed to as she is to VILE. But of course that doesn't happen, this is a corporatist Carmen Sandiego as produced by Netflix. We can't actually tell stories that demonize the police or problematize its status as an agent of the state.


There are things worth praising about the show. The artwork is bright and elegant, and although the animation is fairly simplistic most of the time, it works, and occasionally a scene will dazzle. And having recently gone through Where on Earth in some detail, I was delighted by the many callbacks. So many iconic visual moments got re-worked, so many returns from fun characters. I think my favorite callback was when Carmen used meat to decoy some guard dogs, as she did in the finale of Where on Earth. Such a little detail, it conveys how much affection the new show has for the history of the franchise. Then, too, many of the antagonists are familiar from past incarnations of the franchise. I do wish the sense of overweening impossible ambition had made it over to this show more intact. In Where on Earth, Carmen steals the Boston Tea Party! She steals the Colosseum! At best in the new show, Carmen steals the Magna Carta, or all of the world's Vermeers. The action is not on the same scale.

The storytelling on a character level was quite well done. Carmen's personal arc over the nine episodes of the first series is really effectively told, with some nice payoff in the finale to seeds planted in earlier episodes. Zach and Ivy and Player are somewhat less fully realized, but there is room for backstory episodes on them to flesh out their lives in the future. Julia and Devineaux and Crackle and Tigress are all interesting characters. And I really liked Paper Star in the limited time we saw her.

As educational material, well... I just got through obsessively watching Where on Earth, and that show is much, much denser in geographic and cultural educational content than this one, but also much more overtly and tediously didactic about it. I found I was mostly fastforwarding past the C5 corridor lectures about the key landmarks of the places Zach and Ivy were traveling to, and I never fastforwarded past anything on the new show. But that's both good and bad. I think children's media has gotten less didactic than it was when I was a child overall.