JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS

The Holograms and the Misfits from the Jem board game.

Jem the doll.

About a month ago, The Hub, the children's networked owned by Hasbro toys, resurrected another toy-based property, Jem and the Holograms (1985-88).  Based on a doll line of the same name and designed to be one long commercial for them (just like G.I. Joe, Transformers, My Little Pony and He-Man at the Mattel camp), head writer Christy Marx took the task of fleshing out the characters and making them viable enough to sustain a half hour weekly program. 

Jerrica and Synergy.

The result was the story about a girl named Jerrica who inherits her father's music company, Starlight Music, and control of their live-in orphanage, Starlight House.  However, Starlight's now co-owner, Eric Raymond, has his own ambitions and complete cuts Jerrica out of Starlight in order to promote his new band, the Misfits, who go against everything Starlight stood for.  All seems hopeless until Jerrica receives special earrings that served as micro projectors for a computer her father made, Synergy: a hologram generating A.I. devised to put on the ultimate show.  Using it to disguise herself as Jem, Jerrica and her band the Holograms step up to battle Eric and the Misfits at every turn and save Starlight Music.

Since I didn't have the memory capacity I do now, the most I remembered from this show after having not seen it for over 20 years was the intro and the commercial bumpers.  Ordinarily, with some exceptions, seeing an 80s show after all this time usually makes me cringe.  Two prime examples are G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero and Transformers (now called Generation 1).  But this show actually held up in the sense it had me hooked from the first episode.  A few things that helped:

The Holograms and Misfit Pizazz.

-The animation: Despite how choppy or stiff the 80s toons tend to be in comparison to today's toons, the simple fact is they were all done in the style I like...which is to say comic book style.  Every cartoon from the decade starring real people looked like it jumped off the page of an old comic.  I will take that over anything new Cartoon Network puts out now.





-The characters: Marx did an excellent job taking a 2-dimensional gimmick and giving the characters depth, making them compelling and interesting.

-The music: The songs are done as little music video interludes that relate to a situation going on in the main plot, resulting in usually three per episode, plus a repeat or two if the overall episode ran short.  Despite the fact the songs are only a minute or so, they are wonderfully done.  They're good enough to make you wish there were full-length versions available somewhere. Not to mention Britta Philips, the singing voice of Jem, whose beautiful vocals brought many of them to life.

Rio and Jerrica.

However, the show is not without its flaws.  The episodes apart from the ones done by Marx do fall into 80s tropes of campiness and contrived situations. The perils the Misfits get the Holograms into sometimes border on downright felonious, making one wonder how they never saw any jail time.  Also, the only good male character (in season 1), Jem/Jerica's boyfriend Rio, only serves to be a sounding board of reassurance for Jem/Jerrica, leaving him without much of a personality all his own.



Along with the return of the show are talks about either a resurrection, a movie, or an all-new toy line.  With the success of the Transformers, and to a lesser extent G.I. Joe, franchise, the possibility doesn't seem so far-fetched., especially with Shout Factory announcing the new Jem DVD collection they're working on. Hopefully, any attempt to resurrect the franchise will fare much better than some other property's attempts in recent years.  But, in the meantime, check out the show on The Hub every weekday and Saturday and relive some childhood memories.  Or, maybe make some new ones for the kids in your life now.  Guaranteed this is better than anything they're currently watching now.