"Jem is truly outrageous...truly, truly, truly outrageous. No one else is the same. Jem is my name. Jem!"
My Co-worker and best friend (for 30 seconds at a time), Daniel, brought a disc loaded with Jem and the Holograms cartoons into work. Everybody was saying this stuff was pure 100% 1980's. One of those people is my friend, Erin. I have talked with her extensively about the sociopolitical impact of Jem's band and their rivals the Misfits. She's ten years younger than me, but she will often make pop-culture references that are from my generation. To be honest, as much as I searched my mental data-banks, I came up with nothing on Jem or the Misfits (at least a Misfits lacking a lead singer named Danzig). I drew a blank when I tried to remember Jem.
As we watched an old episode, I felt sick. I wanted to vomit. Jem and the band escaped from three different situations where they were faced with almost certain death from falling. The first time, they almost drowned after falling into a killer whale and dolphin tank. Strong, sexy, competent males jumped into the tank in their Miami Vice suits to save the helpless girls. All of those who were wet, donned towels after the rescue in order to protect them from the frigidly cold, eighty degree temperatures they faced after exiting the whale and dolphin tank. Oh God, I wanted to throw up.
The second time, some helpless security guard crashed his golf cart (I bet he only had a G.E.D.), flipped thirty feet into the air, and knocked over a tower populated by Jem and the Holograms. I felt like I was tripping after watching the accident. Jem and the crew all jumped to safety. The last person to jump to safety was one of their man friends. He basically said, 'I'm in control of this shit, let's fuck the Misfits up for what they have tried to do here today.' But not in so many words. Jem and the Holograms told the macho fags in control to chill a little bit and everything was cool. I felt so ill that I thought my heart might stop, but I decided to choose life over an easy exit.
In the third scene, the Misfits unleashed a swarm of deadly bats on Jem and the Holograms in an attempt to knock the band of cuties off of a cliff. No such luck. Jem and her crew were saved by a helicopter piloted by a swarm of tough, muscular men. These caring males with their sweet moustaches put down their long range lens cameras long enough to save Jem and her friends from certain death at the wings of the evil cloud of bats. Bats can fly...but pretty, young girls can't.
I never watched the actual show as a kid (I'm a man, by the way), but the theme song was very familiar. I don't strut around in a Miami Vice suit with long, flowing hair (but I could if I wanted to). When I listen to the classic Jem theme song, the memories of the former mass-merchandising campaign flood back into my fragile little mind. I now remember flipping through the channels of my T.V. past episodes of Jem and the Holograms. We got our first television set including a remote control sometime around the mid 1980's. The set top box for cable television had a remote control as early as the early eighties, but that was a hit or miss thing in our household. My mom didn't want cable to bring any negative influences into our household. As you can tell from reading this blog, it didn't. The bad news is, on any given afternoon after getting home from school, I had to get up and spin the knob of our Quasar television set to switch away from Jem. Click, click, click. UHF to VHF. A minor little adjustment to the rabbit ears and I could watch either He-Man, G. I. Joe, Thundercats, Transformers, or Voltron. I didn't watch Jem and the Holograms when I was a kid.