(The Center Square) – Does a popular educational media franchise promote imperialist narratives? The claim has been made in academic research in the University of Kansas system, the school announced in a press release.
University of Kansas School of Music doctoral candidate T.J. Laws-Nicola and Brent Ferguson, who has a doctorate in music theory from KU, wrote a book chapter called “Who on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? Two Case Studies in Aural Identity” in the new book “The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music: Making Movement Sing.”
Laws-Nicola and Ferguson wrote that the music composers in the 1992 video game “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” and the 1994 animated series “Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?” picked motifs that function as “an ironic set of musical chains — binding Carmen sonically where she is otherwise free.”
The researchers describe Carmen Sandiego, a Latina character, as an antihero in the game universe. They wrote that in the games, players “travel the Earth as an A.C.M.E. (The Agency to Classify and Monitor Evildoers) agent capturing villains of the organization V.I.L.E. (Villain’s International League of Evil), which is led by Sandiego.”
“It’s part of my dissertation research,” Laws-Nicola said in KU’s release. “I look at animation, and in particular bad women, women antagonists, and how they’re treated sonically. I’m looking at what the trends are and the unconscious bias we have when we’re listening to and also creating sounds.”
Laws-Nicola claimed that intentional and unintentional power structures were “being put out on display” in the two series studied.
“The whole series is sort of a cat-and-mouse game between her organization and A.C.M.E. … and there are a lot of symbols and ways you can take it,” Laws-Nicola said in the release. “I don’t necessarily say that the animators of the game or the show expressly wanted Carmen thought of as an imperialist symbol. But often, when you create something, once you show it to the world, your intent doesn’t really matter so much as how it’s interpreted by those that consume what you’ve made. I just felt that there was a way to look at this sort of animation or show critically, which is how we how we approach things.”
The authors claim the TV show’s theme song, an adaptation of a song in Mozart’s opera “The Abduction of the Seraglio,” is an example of exoticism.
“The opening title theme for the show is a rock adaptation of the end of Act 1,” Laws-Nicola said in the release. “It’s a big finale number from the opera. The Pasha, who is the antagonist of the opera because he stole the protagonist’s love interest — physically kidnapped and kept her — comes in with his entire crew.”
“It’s done in the Alla Turca style, which was very popular at the time. Mozart was well known for creating or contributing to the creation of this style, which musically connoted the Turkish Janissaries,” Laws-Nicola added. “Typical aspects were lots of cymbals or percussion and big chorus-type numbers. An audience watching ‘The Abduction of the Seraglio’ at that time would have felt that that number was exotic, in part because the antagonist is supposed to be foreign, but also because the musical style was markedly different than anything else in the opera.”
Laws-Nicola claimed that while the original song was guilty of exoticism, the show makes it worse.
“The show uses an adaptation of that same theme,” Laws-Nicola said in the release. “They just update it, which adds this extra layer. The song is already exoticist, and you have it filtered through a pop adaptation for a theme song for a thief who goes around the world stealing things. It just seemed like really tongue-in-cheek. A bit on the nose, if you will.”
Additionally, Laws-Nicola said the show creates a negative connotation for nonwhite women.
“Whether or not Mozart respected the Turkish Janissaries, there’s an exoticist connotation that is developed on top of all of this,” Laws-Nicola said in the release. “So this connotation of thieving or taking what isn’t yours, or the keeping the racial purity of women, these are all sort of undertones and connotations of this exoticist style. And when you toss that in with a children show, and the woman antagonist happens to be a thief … you buy into that negative connotation, intentional or not. What we were trying to get at in the article is that the song’s a whole jam, and you can still enjoy the show. But keep in mind that the sonic layer of what’s being done here isn’t completely innocent.”
