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In This Issue

• Jem and the Holograms Suck Major Holo-Ass
• Students Get Involved, Eat Pizza
• Kids Aren't Worth It
• Can You Tell Me How To Get, How to Get to HIV
• Corporation Brightens Otherwise Bleak Childhood
• B'nai Mitzvot of Yore
• Cap'n Planet Saves World, Gouges You
• Bad Street Brawler Jerks Off Crime Off the Streets
• Science Proves America's Youth Turning Japanese
• On the Glorious Afterschool Special
• Chicken Soup for the Athletically Inept Soul
• A Researched Dildography
• Rider Strong Gets Stalked, Interviewed, Married
• Furry is the Way to Be

Their songs WERE better. The Misfits from left to right: Stormer, Roxy, Danzig, Jetta, and Pizzazz

Nostalgia. In some way, we'd all like to return to our former days of glory, innocence, or hustling. Let me just say this: do not give in to temptation! Allow nostalgia to remain just that: a time glorified in memory alone. Believe me. I made the mistake.

For instance, remember the 80's cartoon show Jem and the Holograms? Oy. SO much better in my memory.

Re-watching the "full feature film" (available at Kim's), my friends and I found ourselves ultimately horrified and disappointed. Despite what you may recall, this movie is tainted by poor animation, a script written by monkeys, and as much forethought as an attempt to climb atop a pile of rusty industrial waste barrels.

To remind you: Jerrica Benton inherited half of her father's company Starlight Music, a foster home called Starlight House, and a pair of high-tech earrings. The earrings allow her to communicate with Synergy, an "audio-visual synthesizer" (a.k.a. big-ass hologram machine) of her father's design. With Synergy and her friends, she creates the band Jem and the Holograms to make money for the orphans, and to beat the "evil" punk band the Misfits out of the charts. Jem is Jerrica's mysterious holographic alter-ego that no no one, including Jem's boyfriend Rio, can recognize, despite Jem's remarkably poor efforts to conceal it.

And so Jem, Lena, Aja, and Kimber battle what is essentially the diabolical power of punk rock music by playing their sugar pop and riding around in the Rockin' Roadster. Pizazz, Roxy, Stormer, and Clash, as the nefarious punks that they are, generally cause mischief and mayhem. As a child, I accepted this. As an adult, I cry out in protest: why must we brand the sacred establishment of punk rock as evil? The cartoon depicts the popular music industry as an essentially good and gentle place, with heroes that fend off alternative music because it is intrinsically foul and immoral. I remain appalled, hurt, and betrayed by my own previous enjoyment of this cartoon.

Let me repeat that this toon suffers from shoddy Hanna-Barbera production values. It amounts to the cartoon version of a four-year-old's macaroni and construction paper valentine: there's some thought there, but for the most part, no skill. The show is interspersed with 40-second "music videos" by the two bands. As the cartoon goes on, they include more and more clips from previous videos, until the final one is a bizarre conglomeration of previous clips, not even in synch any more to the shitty 80's wuss-pop.

Bad animation is offset by even worse story lines. A plot twist amouns to no more creative methods of storyboarding than a randomly introduced character who announces, "And to sweeten the deal, the winner gets this mansion!" and then steps back and disappears, having said his one line. An argument scene between evil executive Eric Raymond and misguided orphan Ashley is ridiculously redundant. Ashley: "No!" Cut to Raymond: "Yes!" Cut back to Ashley: "No!", etc.

And then we come to societal stereotypes, which truly tore apart my nostalgic vision of Jem. I'll begin with the tamer of the two examples. At a party with higher-ups in the music industry, Jem and the Holograms are introduced to "the raddest director in the business." Upon seeing that he is black, the other Holograms push the black member of the band towards him. Says Jem, "Lena has an idea for a video, don't you Lena?' She replies, "What? No, I don't... Oh! I See! Yeah..." and she walks off with the black dude. Why the racial segregation?

The worst, the absolute worst to me, though, is that in my memory, Jem and the Holograms was laced with strong feminist themes and role models. I mean, c'mon! Jerrica was co-exec of her own record company! Jem was a superstar and virtual superhero (though we've established that all she was fighting against was punk rock.) Superficially, it's feminist. Let me pause for a second, though. Take a look at Jem's "superpower." It's holograms. She says it herself when she first sees it: "Why, it's an illusion! A trick!" It's so great that she can use it to hit on her boyfriend as her more glamorous counterpart! But when they're in real physical danger, i.e. hanging over a cliff, being chased by the punk Zipper and his goons, or about to be run over by a bulldozer, who comes to the rescue? Rio. The message is fairly clear. Ultimately, Jem's power amounts to no more than female deception, and it's only the real physicality of men that counts for anything. Nyeah nyeah nyeah!

Trying to re-live my youthful days of cheesy ‘80s cartoons produced one terrible result: instead of being nostalgic for the pop culture of my youth, I'm now nostalgic for the days when I was nostalgic for the pop culture of my youth, and not jaded by the reality of my youth. This meta-nostalgia will surely be the downfall of our great nation. Goodbye, post-modernity. Hello, post-pubescent depression!