She's Got the Power

If any cartoon brings me back to my childhood, it's Jem and the Holograms. My sisters and I were huge fans of this show between it's mid-80s debut and around 1991-ish. You might call it the first animated American soap opera. No goofy dogs or cutesy babies here. The issues may have been overblown, but they were real issues, from parental abandonment to adoption and foster children to business ethics and moral codes.

The title characters are an extremely 80s pop group, right down to their colorful hair and makeup, the huge shoulder pads on their clothing, and the heavy reliance on technology. Jem's real name is Jerrica. She uses the hologram computer her father created to create two distinct personalities, like an older Hannah Montana. Her back-up group consists of her tomboy sister Kimber and two adopted sisters, one black, one Asian. (A later addition to the group was from Mexico.)

This show is as 80s as you can get. At least three or four songs were incorporated into every episode as flashy MTV-style "music videos." The women wear elaborate, ruffled gowns with enormous shoulder pads and are slathered with makeup that would make Kiss jealous; the men are either sleazoids, dumb goons, British pretty boys, or obvious love interests. (And some of them have interesting hair colors, too.)

Despite still being very much of it's era, this is probably the best of the childhood favorites I've been watching in the past week or so by far. Other than the dated feel, there's some minor complaints. This show can be ridiculously melodramatic, and there is some violence. It's not for the littlest misses, but pre-teen girls who are into Hannah and High School Musical and don't mind the crazy look may still enjoy it.

These two moving episodes from the series' third season are the ones I always remembered best...because they're so different from anything else I've ever seen in an American animated TV show. Jerrica and her sister Kimber recalls how their late father created the Starlight music company and the orphanage it provides money for, the death of their mother, and the adoption of the other Holograms.

Out of the Past - Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Father's Day - Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

The girls and I had a lot of the toys, too. Rose was the most into the show and had the most dolls from the line - Aja, the original pink-clad Jem/Jerrica, Roxy of the Misfits, their choreographer friend Dance, and the computer-generated female character who gave Jerrica her Jem personality, Synergy. I had Kimber and the head of the Misfits, Pizazz. (I still like Pizazz a lot. She's one of the major inspirations for the villain character Sheila Saunders in our Monkees role play story.) Anny had the later "Gitter and Gold" Jem/Jerrica and the bright pink stage playset that doubled as a cassette player, along with a lot of the clothes from the "Glitter and Gold" line. I remember setting up all the dolls we had on the stage, playing a Jem cassette, and pretending I was at a concert on their show.

Even Mom wholeheartedly embraced Jem, despite the toys' high price tag. Maybe she liked the catchy music. Or perhaps she appreciated the fact that the show was not only very well-written and performed, but one of the only 80s animated shows written and created almost entirely by women. Or maybe she just liked that the dolls were much larger and more life-like than Barbie dolls, and their huge, glittery shoes were a lot harder to lose or get caught in the vacuum cleaner.