Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? "Auld Lang Gone" (non-existent episode of PBS children's game show; 1992)

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This article has been tagged as Needing work due to its poor writing.



WitwiCSTitleCard.jpg

The logo from the series

Status: Non-existent

Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? was an American game show based on the Carmen Sandiego computer game series that premiered on PBS on September 30, 1991 and ended December 22, 1995. The show was a massive success, winning seven daytime Emmys and being nominated for 23 and has been called the "Crown Jewel" of the Carmen Sandiego series by NerdHQ.[1] The show was hosted by Greg Lee and had a chief who was played by the late Lynne Thigpen. 295 episodes were record and all of them have aired. An unaired episode called "Auld Lang Gone" has long been rumored, but exhaustive research[2] in 2020 confirmed the episode as non-existent.

Format

Three contestants (called Gumshoes) are given 50 "Crime Bucks" to start off with, then various comedic sketches are performed, each one of them providing clues to a geographical location of the round's criminal. After the clues are provided, a map with three marked locations is shown to the Gumshoes. Each Gumshoe must select the location and reveal their choice to Greg. Each correct guess awards the Gumshoe 10 Crime Bucks. The lowest scoring Gumshoe is eliminated from the game and the two highest scoring Gumshoes go on to to the second round called the "Jailtime Challenge"

The Jailtime Challenge starts with the "Chief" describing various landmarks in a certain country, city, or region in a "Photo Recon". Fifteen of the landmarks are placed on a board. Hidden behind three of the landmarks are the loot (that is stolen at the beginning of the show), the warrant to arrest the criminal, and the crook themself. Hidden behind the other landmarks are simple footprints, indicating that nothing is there and the Gumshoe's turn is skipped. The Gumshoe who has the highest score from the last round picks first. If two remaining gumshoes were tied, a coin toss would occur to see who would go first. If a Gumshoe finds at least one or two of those items, they get a free turn. If the Gumshoe finds all three items in any order, the round ends and the Gumshoe that found the items goes onto the final round called "Carmen's World Map".

In "Carmen's World Map," the winning Gumshoe tries to catch Carmen Sandiego herself. The Gumshoe is then shown a giant map on the studio floor with dots indicating cities and islands, squares indicating parks and monuments, and arrows indicating bodies of water. Greg reads the locations and the Gumshoe must mark that location on the map with a marker (the marker itself has a siren on top). If they place the marker on the correct location, the siren goes off and Greg gives the next location. If the Gumshoe needs to move the incorrectly placed marker in order to find the right location, they are allowed to do so. If the Gumshoe marks the seven correct locations with the seven markers in 45 seconds or less, Carmen is "captured," and the winning contestant wins a trip to anywhere in the United States (this was only in the first season, as in the second, it was expanded to anywhere in North America) If they fail to complete the task correctly in that time frame, the Gumshoe instead wins a consultation prize.

Supposed "Lost Episode"

The episode rumored to exist was called "Auld Lang Gone" and was unaired due to what happened in the final part of the episode. The contestant Jasmine Doman was doing the final round of Carmen's World Map and broke her arm and production stopped and the runner-up Ed Mann ended up finishing the round in 13 seconds.[3] The issues the episode ran into didn't stop there. Sean Atlman (from Rockapella) ripped Greg's jacket, Lynne had a sore throat so Greg took over as Chief and Double Dare host Marc Summers took over hosting duties for the rest of the episode. Actor Gene Wilder also appeared in the episode in a unknown role.[4] The episode went unedited.

The episode was set to air on October 12, 1992, but was pulled due to the chaos the episode caused and the Season Two premiere "Disturbing The Heavenly Peace" was rerun in its place. Rumors of the episodes existence persist throughout the years of the episode's existence and was previously thought to be fake. Neither Greg Lee nor Marc Summers had commented on the episode's existence. However a photo of Lee and Summers in the same outfit surfaced sometime in the 2010s, which has many to speculated that the photo was from the episode but it has not been confirmed.

Debunking the Rumor

On August 23, 2020, Christian Carrion (news editor of the game show news site BuzzerBlog) ran an article called “Gone” But Not Forgotten: Exploring the Myth of the Lost Carmen Sandiego, Part 1. The article was about the existence of the episode and in the article, Carrion says he emailed Paul Byers (the Executive Chief of Engineering and 50-year veteran of WQED) about the series and he received a reply from Byers saying that the WQED archive has the entire series intact and Carrion followed up with the topic of the episode and he received a reply that simply said "Christian, I have the episode. Paul" then the article ended with "To be continued"[5]confirming the episode's existence. Although the episode's existence had been officially confirmed, two days later, BuzzerBlog wrote a follow-up article saying that Byers thought that Carrion was talking about "Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego" and not "Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego" and that the entire "World" series may have sent to WGBH. That led Carrion to email game show expert Bob Boden who got Carrion a connection to a man named Howard Blumenthal (the creator and producer of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego). The final part of the article went online on August 27, 2020.[6] In the final part of the article, Carrion received a reply from the creator saying that the episode doesn't exist. At the same time, he received a email from Marc Summers also confirming the episode didn't exist in the first place.

Reference