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The one true animated superstar of the digital world, so far, is Carmen Sandiego.
Created in 1985 for a disk software game, Carmen has weathered all the recent ups and downs of digital entertainment--the tentative early years, the boom in the mid-1990s as CD-ROMs flooded the market and then the shakeout as the realization dawned on the industry that not everything in life could be successfully wedged into a digital format.
Carmen has survived, while many other digital characters have gone on to the printed circuit in the sky. And she isn't even a heroine--Carmen is a clever, enemy secret agent who hops from country to country around the globe to avoid detection. Kids playing the basic game, "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?," have to answer questions and solve puzzles in order to track her down, and in doing so, they learn about geography and about the people who live in the countries she visits. Several versions of the game have been released for various age groups, and there is even a spinoff PBS television show.