It takes real effort to make a truly bad documentary. Even if you (the viewer) aren’t interested in the topic or even disagree with the thesis, a doc is usually at least informative and interesting on some level. Seeking Mavis Beacon gets it all wrong in some pretty baffling ways.

Back in the day, I worked mall-based retail at the defunct software store Babbage’s. On those shelves, I stocked, recommended, and sold Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing… a popular edutainment title. On the cover was Mavis Beacon herself, a pretty young Black woman who I assumed was huge in the field of Big Typing. Years later, I learned she was fictional… that the Software Toolworks made a typing game and needed a personality to sell it.

This may not be the most interesting story to you, but it was to me. I mean, I knew Carmen Sandiego never existed to steal the Eiffel Tower, but I assumed Mavis was out there. So I was curious about the backstory and I thought this film would deliver. And if the fact a Black woman on the box inspired children to learn to type based on seeing someone who looked like them, that’s interesting too. Not something this pasty white guy had ever considered.

But this documentary isn’t about Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. It barely even goes into detail explaining the software much less digging into how and why it was developed. The doc is about finding the woman on the cover… not Mavis herself, but a model who was hired to sell the product. But actually it’s not even about that; it’s really about the documentarians themselves.

And I’m sure these are two smart and driven young ladies but they wildly misjudge my interest in who they are and how they work. Do I really need multiple scenes of setting up their office and how they have to fight to hold onto it? Dance parties they attend? Or how they traveled the country and only got COVID when they got home and played a game of Settlers of Cataan? The movie is already way too long for such little actual info about their subject.

I’m sure their friends and family would appreciate their efforts, but I sat there baffled, wondering when they were going to get to the point. Some details are scattered throughout, but it’s so hyper-focuses on finding a single person that it starts to get creepy. It becomes clear she doesn’t want to be found but they keep digging.

I could go on and on about all the odd, weird, erratic, and borderline cynical things in this doc, but this review is already way too long for a topic most people won’t care about. An hour and forty minutes and I learned a handful of facts and a lot about the filmmakers.

Score: 62