"Me and my friends are Jem girls! Jem! Jem is my name! Exciting adventure, fashion and fame - once you're a Jem girl, you're never the same. C'mon, c'mon and be a Jem girl! Jem! Jem is my name!" - "Jem and the Holograms" Theme Song
Jem and the Holograms: The Complete First and Second Seasons DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Okay, I'll admit it: at the risk of emasculating myself, I'm a Jem-aholic. That's right, I'm a Jem girl, and I'm not ashamed of it. Well, a little ashamed, but the spunky, pink-haired heroine of Jem and the Holograms would probably want me to take pride in being the unique individual that I am. With this in mind, I'll hold my head up high, although I'm probably now a prime candidate for testosterone replacement therapy. Until I receive that first injection, I'll continue to enjoy each cornball moment of this mid-eighties cartoon that definitively proves the existence of at least three hundred shades of pink.
Jem is an animated, candy-colored pre-teen soap opera, possessing the trademark simplistic complexity of its more grown-up cousins like Beverly Hills 90210 and The Young and the Restless. After the death of her father, Jerrica Benton inherits both Starlight House, a foster home for girls, and one half of Starlight Music, her dad's record label. Jerrica sets out to run Starlight House with her younger sister Kimber and their pals Aja and Shana. With the home in disrepair and in need of a cash infusion, Jerrica turns to Starlight Music, which has always funded the charitable project. New CEO Eric Raymond (who inherited the other half of the company) refuses to give any support, instead choosing to use the Starlight Music's money to promote his latest discovery, the Misfits, a rude, raucous band featuring hellions Pizzazz, Roxy, and Stormer. Raymond has even rigged a battle of the bands so that the Misfits can come out on top. Outraged by Raymond's tactics, Jerrica becomes determined to regain her father's legacy.
Upon returning to Starlight House, Jerrica discovers a box containing a pair of large earrings left for her by her father. When she puts the earrings on, a mysterious woman materializes out of thin air, instructing the young heiress and her friends to go to the Starlight Drive-In. There they discover Synergy, a large computer system developed by Mr. Benton. The system is capable of producing highly realistic holograms using special transmitters located in the earrings. The drive-in also contains a stash of ultra-hip clothing and a cool pink and gold car. ("Cool," of course, being a highly subjective term in this case). This gives Jerrica a radical idea: she will use Synergy to transform herself into Jem, a pink-haired pop singer. With her friends as her backup group, Jem and the Holograms will enter the battle of the bands to win the prize money for Starlight House.
Complicating matters (since all good soaps thrive on being able to endlessly complicate even the most mudane matters) is the fact that Jerrica, Kimber, Aja, and Shana must keep Synergy - and thus Jem's real identity - a secret. This proves to be difficult for Jerrica, especially when it comes to her boyfriend Rio. Rio struggles to remain faithful to Jerrica even as he finds himself attracted to Jem. Will Rio learn Jem's secret? Will the evil Misfits succeed in destroying Jem and the Holograms? Will Jerrica discover that purple isn't Rio's natural hair color? Each episode of Jem and the Holograms leaves viewers pondering these and other important questions.
In between each soapy plot development, the episodes contain three music videos, typically one from the Misfits and two from the Holograms. The Holograms' songs tend to be about love, sharing, and other positive subjects while the Misfits sing about making "Mischief" and other bad (but not TOO bad) behavior. Both groups sound like a melding of Debbie Gibson, Tiffany, a smidge of Joan Jett punk, and a generous heap of generically perky toy commercial theme music. Still, the music manages to be catchy in spite of itself.
The videos are like trippy hallucinations fueled by too many sugar-filled chocolate malts. Dolphins, seals, unicorns, rainbows, and people riding unicorns over rainbows abound, as do dreamy kisses between Jem/Jerrica and Rio in exotic locales. These videos are outrageously weird and irresistible.
"Outrageously weird and irresistible" pretty much describes the series as a whole. Its over-the-top "girl power" attitude elevates the series to camp, but is also oddly endearing. Jem and the Holograms is almost impossible to take seriously, yet this earnestly goofy charm makes it extremely watchable.
The show premiered in 1985, and it offers many opportunities for viewers to revel in '80s style. MTV was becoming a major cultural force, and Jem's mimicking of its conventions (including the song titles and artist listings at the start of each "video") is a fun throwback to an earlier time when music video channels actually played music videos. The clothing and hair style choices for the Misfits also seem to have been, strangely enough, influenced heavily by '80s hair bands like Van Halen and Winger or, quite possibly, by the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. Not only is Jem's singing style similar to that of Debbie Gibson, she also wears Gibson's trademark oversized hats and vibrant mall clothes. Of course since Gibson didn't appear on the scene until 1987, perhaps we can blame Jem for Gibson's career.
Like many cartoons from the '80s, Jem and the Holograms was essentially designed as a commercial to sell a line of toys. As the show's writer/creator, Christy Marx, explains in this set's supplemental material, the dolls were created first and then the series (and thus the dolls' back story) was created later, almost as an afterthought. The series began its life as part of "Super Saturday" (or "Sunday," depending on when it ran on local stations), a half-hour show that insanely sandwiched segments of Jem between two decidedly more male-centric toy-based segments. Jem was later spun off into its own series. The first season, consisting of five episodes, features a continuous narrative arc. The first three episodes of the second season also consist of a mini-series-like arc, but most of the other episodes are standalones.
The twenty-six episodes that make up the first and second seasons are divided onto four discs. The discs are housed in a super girlie, impossible to describe fold-out holder that resembles a purse. The front of the box features a youthful portrait of Jem along with a sparkly rendition of her name. I'm not one to start rumors, but she's quite obviously had some work done since her show went off of the air. A booklet housed in a folder pocket provides episode summaries and lists chapter stops.
