Mega Mindy is the star of the Studio 100 TV series and of the new film Het Geheim van Mega Mindy (The Secret of Mega Mindy), which opens this week across Flanders to certain success.
The story goes like this: Mieke is a police officer in a small town, who lives with her Opa and Oma (grandpa and grandma). She's painfully timid and in love with fellow officer Toby. There's a crime wave in town, but, luckily, when things get too much for the cops, Mieke transforms into a superhero with super strength, teleportation and cutting wisecracks.
That's basically the plot of every episode, and in the film the only difference is that there is a gang of baddies on the loose, freed from jail by Miss Volta, a villain with a heart like the core of a nuclear reactor. She incapacitates people with her Van Der Graaf-type apparatus, allowing her to steal untold riches.
Miss Volta is another very good thing. She's played by the flamboyantly-named Yolanthe Cabau van Kasbergen, and it's an in-joke that will go over the kids' heads that she speaks with a Dutch accent sharp enough to slice your Gouda. She's brunette to Mindy's blonde, and shows a deal more décolleté, which is all the evidence we need that she's a bad ‘un. The male characters are virtually extras. The commissioner is an imbecile; the bad guys about as gangstery as the Anthill Mob.
And then there's Toby. He's my one objection to the otherwise positive message of Mega Mindy, which is basically this: It's okay to have lovely hair and dress in pink so long as you're also kicking ass. He's the fatal flaw in the whole gorgeous feminist construction.
Because it turns out that Mega Mindy is not primarily concerned with fighting crime: her first concern is to get Toby. It appears that Studio 100 doesn't really want little girls to grow up proactive, independent and strong at all - they only want them to fall in love.
Toby, who's played by Louis Talpe, is attractive enough, but he's not good enough for Mindy for two reasons: 1) he's incompetent; 2) he's a work colleague. Hello? That's always a recipe for disaster.
I'll let you in on the secret of Mega Mindy: it's not that inside every shy little girl is a superhero waiting to come out, it's that she doesn't want Toby to know she's really only Mieke deep down.
Studio 100 will rake it in for the short time it takes for every little girl in Flanders to see it. Not one of them will mind that the screenplay (with five names attached, or three more than it took to write Citizen Kane) is a rehash of any episode of the TV series. It'll be enough that there will be a whole new range of merchandising, from bathrobes to sticking plasters to lunchboxes to costumes.
If Free Souffriau hadn't been born of flesh and blood, Studio 100 would have had to invent her.
She graduated from the Antwerp City Ballet Institute, by which time she already had roles in musicals like Sleeping Beauty, The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz, and others followed regularly. In 2005 she was diagnosed with cancer of the lymphatic system, but the following year she was already back to work - in Pinocchio and on TV in Mega Mindy.
She began to perform as herself in the TV show Steracteur, Sterartiest, in which actors get up and sing. Since she had a slight advantage over most of her competitors, she won easily, raising €35,000 for a cancer charity.
In another TV show, Zo is er maar één, presented by the late lamented Yasmine, Souffriau performed songs by Ann Christy, a Flemish singer of the 1970s who died of cancer in 1984, reaching the final. The experience encouraged her to record a CD of covers of Ann Christy songs, which she then took on tour around the region. Last year she starred opposite Jelle Cleymans in the smash-hit musical Daens.
Souffriau, 29, married a work colleague: Miguel Wiels is a composer for Studio 100 as well as being the long-time accompanist of Koen Crucke (Alberto from Samson & Gert) and the house pianist for channel één. The couple has a one-year-old son, whose name is Wolf.
Colour in our image of Mega Mindy in the PDF only (download here) for the chance to win a family ticket for four entries to Het Geheim van Mega Mindy. Winners will be chosen in five age categories: 0-3, 4-6, 7-9, 10-12 and over 12 (this includes you parents, so fire up those crayons).
Mail entry with age noted to:
Mega Mindy contest
Flanders Today
Gossetlaan 30
1702 Groot-Bijgaarden
All entries received by 8 July will be considered. Winners will be notified by 9 July.
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