The Jem and the Holograms Trailer: How Universal is Getting This All Wrong
With the film's first trailer already receiving an outrageous amount of backlash, a Jem fan weighs in.
My love for Jem—the mid-1980s Saturday morning cartoon about the outrageous lives of four supercomputer-assisted sisters who form a band and use holograms and music to teach important moral and sartorial lessons to the world—is definitely adorned with rose-colored glasses. Like most Saturday morning cartoons, Jem cared little for plot consistency or character development, and all of the major shakeups to the show’s cast were tied to Hasbro merchandising concerns. Still, Jem managed to tell stories that hinted at a wide variety of complex themes: the value of being true to yourself; of diversity; of sexual identity; of compassion for other people; of knowing where you come from and appreciating where others come from as well; of creative expression; and of knowing that following your dream requires real work. And that’s ignoring the revolutionary gender dynamics of the show. Relatively speaking, Jem could have been an introduction to the parts of the riotgrrrl movement that 5- to 10-year-olds could actually understand.
Which is why the recently released trailer (see below) for Jem and the Holograms, Universal’s upcoming live action adaptation, is a major let down on all fronts. Not only does the movie look about as expensive as a typical episode of star Aubrey Peeple’s current television show, Nashville—it’s not surprising that Hollywood was willing to dump $150 million into the first live action Transformers movie, then put only $5 million into the adaptation of a property aimed primarily at girls—but the fact that Jem is an action-ready spectacle of an animated series has been ignored altogether. We’re talking a series featuring Synergy, an all-powerful holograph-generating supercomputer, and about 80-billion close-call action set pieces where various characters almost die. Jem and the Holograms—at least based on what we see in the trailer—has scrubbed every one of these high-octane elements.
The removal of Synergy is particularly aggravating, since without her I don’t understand the point of calling this “Jem and the Holograms.” This is like doing a reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that tells the story of a group of BFFs who are pretty good at ninjutsu and decide to name their club “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” because they think mutants and turtles are cool. Shredder is no longer an evil crime lord trying to kill them; he’s just a callous ninjutsu instructor who wants Leo to ditch Don, Raph and Mike to become the star of his team. Leo flirts with fame, but realizes that family is more important. Everybody hugs it out and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles win the big karate match!
Instead of holograms and evil Eric Raymond (the cartoon’s primary antagonist, who in the film is a woman and less overtly evil and played by Juliette Lewis) trying to kill the Holograms, the trailer suggests that Jem and the Holograms is essentially going to replicate the same tired story told by every other film about a band catching their big break. Jerrica (Peeples), Kimber (Stephanie Scott), Aja (Hayley Kiyoko) and Shana (Aurora Perrineau) get famous after Kimber posts a video of Jerrica singing one of her songs online; Jerrica, rechristened “Jem” by her new label, must decide between fame and family when the label wants to make her a solo star. She’ll totally have to apologize to her band for hubris right before they all gather onstage to play whatever song closes out the movie (the one that got them famous, right?). If you want to do a remake of Josie and the Pussycats, just do that. (Well, don’t…at least that movie had some laughs. This one looks like a dirge.)
Though I find the costume and makeup design in this live action glimpse hilarious—which seems to be the correct way to respond to the costume and makeup design—I’m still worried that the movie will pull a card from the playbook of both Josie and the Pussycats and Hannah Montana: The Movie. From the trailer, Jerrica apparently puts on a Jem wig because she’s afraid to show “herself” on camera. One can only logically imagine, then, that post-reconciliation, when the Holograms prepare to play the movie’s final song, they’ll take the outfits off, telling the audience and each other that their “outrageous” looks were just the “artifice” of fame, a distraction from their true selves. If that happens, the movie is basically dismissing the colorful fashion of the original series out of hand, as if it was simply superficial, or a disguise that masked the authenticity of true artistry—and not, as in the series, an extension of the outrageous creative expression of the band, and a symbol for the way style can be an aesthetic extension of individual personality.
Yes, the revolving fashions were also a marketing ploy by Hasbro to sell dolls and outfits—the show was still involved in teaching young girls how to be proper women in a free market economy, and still a shill for capitalism—but the cartoon managed to frame that with a more complicated message than “buy your dolls cloths.” The likely takeaway this trailer suggests at the heart of Jem—that style is ultimately artificial—is equally problematic. Because jeans and a t-shirt are still a style, and pretending that music is more meaningful just because you take off the wig is super reductive. I’m not even going to parse the hypocrisy of the filmmakers selling the idea that fashion doesn’t matter in a film that I’m 90% sure will feature some kind of fashion montage. Not to mention that this is even a conundrum only in movies about female rock stars. The prevalent assumption that (straight) men don’t care about fashion creates this vacuum where men don’t have style, even though every single male rock star ever is the exception to this rule.