Notes on Jem

I'm writing a recap/review thing for the first episode of Jem, and something occurred to me.  The Misfits are the "bad" group, and Jem and the Holograms are the "good" group.  So the Misfits embody all the negative traits, like greed, anger, arrogance, etc.  And Jem and the Holograms embody the virtues: honesty, friendship, kindness, charity, etc.

So what's with the names?  How come it isn't "The Holograms" and "Pizzazz and the Misfits"?  Pizzazz is both the indisputable leader of the Misfits and one of the most arrogant, self-centred people on the show.  But Jem is the one that feels the need to distinguish herself as the Leader And Most Important Person in the name of the band, above her friends and sister.

So is Jem/Jerrica secretly a bitch?  I mean, hints of it show up all through the series, like the continued lie to her boyfriend and being a total snob when it comes to the Misfits (she called them and the music they sing trash the first time she sees them, it's no wonder they hate her so much).  Is it really so important to her that she be the most famous and identifiable member of her band?

LOOK AT MEEEEEE

Who's got two thumbs and owns a DVD box set for a slightly terrible 80's cartoon about an all-girl rock group?

I am sure lots of people!  But also, this guy.  Lady guy.  This person.

Me!

That's right, I finally got around to buying the series off of Wyatt, taking advantage of his impulsive nature and subsequent buyer's remorse to get it for cheaps, like the terrible terrible friend that I am.  Of course I will heartlessly take advantage of my closest friends' poor life choices, do you even need to ask?  And of course I've been watching it nonstop since I got it!  I just finished season two.  Unfortunately there's only three seasons -- whyyyyyyyyyy, the show is so amazing!  So terrible!  So unintentionally hilarious!  Why did it have to end so soon, alas.  Well actually, three seasons is a pretty long time for a kid's cartoon to run, I guess.  It's like six non-kid's-show seasons.  Plus it's entirely possible that if the show ran longer even my unreasonable, incomprehensible love for the series would run out, along with my patience.  Three seasons is plenty, I guess. 

But anyway!  I am excited for this.  For a few reasons!  One, the DVD set is actually adorable.  Seriously!  The discs are all designed to look like vinyl records (despite the fact that I'm pretty sure that when this show came out people had started using cassette tapes already), with different colours for the different seasons.  I'm delighted to actually have the box set rather than just download the seasons from Pirate Bay or something.  Plus it isn't taking up any memory on my already-crowded harddrive, which is another perk to DVDs!

Guess what colour season one is!  (hint season one is purple)

Another reason I am happy with this series?  I get to write episode recaps!  Or at least try haha.  I desperately need to mock these episodes, I might as well try my hand writing recap-reviews!  I haven't seen episode recaps online anywhere for this series, at least not for the entire series.  I'm planning to start at the beginning and continue until either I finish the series, or it stops being fun to do.  Here's hoping it's the first one!

A third reason I am happy with this series, I cannot get enough of owning terrible terrible things.  This box set is going on my shelf right between Howard the Duck and Spice World.  Actually it probably won't go next to Spice World because that's a VHS and does not belong on my DVD shelf.  But that is where I will file it in my heart.

I would like to apologize for the worse-than-usual quality of the photos in this post.  I lost my purse

a few weeks ago and my camera along with it, so all I have to take photos with is my iPod touch.  

But oh well, it's Jem.  Why worry about quality now?

Jem and the Holograms

I fucking love Jem and the Holograms.  The series is just fantastically bad in every way.  I'm going to buy the series box set off a friend who, in a moment of insanity, bought it at HMV and has never stopped regretting the purchase, at least not that I've seen.  I don't know why.  It's such an amazing show, it's like this perfect explosion of mediocre 80's trash that somehow adds up to more than the sum of its parts.  It is so bad it has become fantastic.

I mean, just look at the opening!  The animation is admittedly six to eight times better than you will ever see in the actual show, but the rest of it is a fairly good demonstration of the show in general.  The wet troll-doll hairstyle, the inane lyrics, the freeze-frame-spinning-star-title-card at the end.  It's absolutely glorious.

So according to the lyrics, when Jem is not being Excitement or Adventure (ie. most of the time) she is Outrageous.  I could make a crack like "I disagree!  I find she is not outrageous at all, but is in fact a boring character on a terrible children's cartoon from the Eighties!"  But the actual definition for outrageous, according to Google and therefore Right and True, is this:

And honestly if I were asked to describe this show to somebody who had never heard of it, I would use all those words in the definition to describe it.  So clearly, this show knew exactly what it was talking about when it wrote the theme song.  And when it was describing the title character.  And when it was describing the music.  Jem, the music's contageous - outrageous!!  It's true, all the songs in this are shockingly bad and to call them contageous is wildly exaggerated and improbable.  Not that I'm a music critic, I leave that to Wyatt.

Though I can't figure out the eye-sparkle when Jem winks.  I get it when it pops up when she kisses Dudeface, because clearly they are into the sloppy droolfest makeouts.  Did he spit in her eye? Is that why she closed it?  And if that's what happened, was it a kink thing or is he just an ass who randomly spits in people's eyes?  Because honestly, I'd believe either.