Jem and the Holograms 20/30 Years After (the Movie)

If you were a child of the 80s, most likely you’d have fond memories of your morning/afternoon then Saturday and Sunday morning cartoons. Many had toy components to them and the cartoons themselves most likely served as additional marketing to help sell those toys (cf the Transformers movie and what happened to various favorites in order to get kids to the buy the next generation of Autobots and Decepticons). In some cases, shows might’ve not lasted for one reason or another nor had a satisfying ending. One such cartoon was Jem and the Holograms. Eventually, it was turned into a live action movie that no one wanted because it vaguely resembled anything from the original premise. That said I started thinking about what a good Jem and the Holograms movie might look like in 2025 (or in short a contemporary version), using the idea that the story of these characters have progressed anywhere between 20-30 years forward, much like many of my fellow Gen-Xers.

For the opening shot, I imagine the scenario going like this. The setting is a normal market like a Vons, Ralphs or Albertsons where a middle aged lady with straightened almost platinum blonde hair and little to no make up works at the register or perhaps is helping to bag up customers’ groceries. This person might have multiple duties that require her to help with store maintenance and we see various shots of her stocking shelves, taking inventory, having a coffee break outside throughout the day. At some point, she is asked to man the new self checkout lines where she appears bored and not paying attention as though in private thoughts. However, one customer asks her for a grocery bag that breaks the woman’s trance. As the woman hands the grocery bag to this customer (who is an older Gen-X person), the customer squints and asks, “Hey, weren’t you Jem from the Holograms?” for which the woman completely denies.

At the end of her shift (which is around 11pm), the woman takes a bus back to her apartment in a seedy section of LA’s south central area. On the ride back, the woman gazes out the window nonchalantly before resting her eyes as it is one of the few times she’s able to get some sleep during the day. When she arrives at her destination, we see her apartment, a worn down spot from years of lack of maintenance with eerily quiet streets peppered with the occasional random sounds of screaming and shots in the distance. The woman doesn’t pay heed to any of the noise and walks down the street in an unconcerned manner before entering her apartment. Many of the windows of the apartment are boarded up with grating as a few windows had been damage possibly through vandalism or even a random baseball.

Once this woman enters her apartment, we see a whole different side to this person. The walls are heavily adorned by media and posters of former rock star known to the world as Jem. The room almost is a testament to this character like a shrine. However, the woman ignores the paraphernalia  and her only concentrated thought is a small bed couch where she collapses from the exhaustion of the day. This is Jem or actually Jerrica Benton of the future.

That starts off this idea of a movie for me. But what has happened to the other characters from the series one may ask?

The Holograms

• Kimber Benton – Jerrica’s sister now is a famous movie soundtrack composer as her talent was well known throughout the industry of being able to whip up a song in a single day. Despite her earlier years, Kimber ended up remaining single, devoting herself to her career. Both Kimber and Jerrica ended up having an acrimonious split though at one point that put the nail in the coffin for the Holograms. Ironically, it was Jerrica who became jealous of Kimber for being scooped up by various movie productions to write their scores and since that point, neither have talked to one another, even for the holidays.
• Shana – When the Holograms dissolved, Shana decided to leave the music business and return to school. She completed a degree in art and design, getting caught up in the web 2.0 era and becoming a UI/UX designer and later a much sought after web producer. She did get married and has a pair of children, an older boy and younger daughter.
• Aja – She ends up marrying a rich abusive lawyer and moves to New York to settle down and become a housewife. Her husband restricts her from socializing and frequently manipulates her into a kind of entrapment lifestyle.
• Raya – After the Holograms dissolves, various other issues come about behind the scenes for Jerrica, the Starlight Music and the Starlight Foundation that dismantles the business and the orphanage. Feeling that her duty was left incomplete after the orphans were abandoned from the Starlight Foundation, Raya returned to South America and became a missionary to help others in need, partly using up her savings from the music business to feed the hungry and help the impoverished.

The Misfits

• Pizzazz – Almost in parallel to Jerrica’s plight, Pizzazz loses her family’s wealth from mismanagement and a dirty accountant. She ends up disbanding the Misfits as Eric Raymond refuses to acknowledge Pizzazz any longer, seeing little he could gain from Pizzazz’s own personal wealth now that it dried up and not wanting to deal with Pizzazz and her various failures. In turn, with the little money remaining Pizzazz possesses, she ends up binge drinking and squandering the bulk of it, becoming homeless for a short period until by chance Jerrica encountered her on the streets of South Central. The two now are roommates, working day jobs with Pizzazz working at a Pizza Hut nearby of all places.
• Roxy – Before the Misfits disbanded, Roxy uncovered Eric Raymond’s scheme with Pizzazz’s family accountant in trying to eradicate any royalties that the band members could make as music went digital. She tried to get Pizzazz to sue both but failed. However, she did leave the accountant and Eric Raymond with big fat lips after clocking them hard with a loaded glove. Since then, Roxy used her savings (where she was one of the frugal ones) to open up her own repair shop and became a self trained mechanic who works on classic racing vehicles (mostly), earning a decent income. She refuses to talk to anyone else within the Misfits after what happened.
• Stormer – The incident with the disbanding of the Misfits caused Stormer a great deal of emotional trauma and made her cynical of the music business. She ended up leaving and becoming a kindergarten teacher and got married to a yoga instructor, who helps her meditate and relax.
• Jetta – She’s one of the few in the series that doesn’t make it. After the Misfits, she formed her own solo act and tried to make it on the indy label scene. However, she grew more involved in the underground punk rock type of scene and fell into hard times with heroin, eventually overdosing. She was found in a shack that she was supposedly recording her next album a few days dead from doing speedballs. Later, Jetta’s demise affects Pizzazz deeply and causes her to stop her own decadent habits of drinking, smoking and her addiction to fast food.

Other characters

• Rio – Eventually, Rio discovers that Jerrica and Jem are the same person. When Starlight Music fails and Jerrica goes through a midlife crisis, Rio (who still was only Jerrica’s BF) decides to escape from it all, confused and joining the military. He ends up in the Afghanistan after 9-11. Unfortunately, he is injured in battle with his leg getting shot and is given a medal for his service. After returning to America, he still has an identity crisis from both the trauma of his time in Afghanistan and the fallout with Jerrica but ends up coming out of the closet and marrying one of his soldier friends from his time in the service. He’s still friendly with a few of the Holograms like Kimber, Raya and Shana but no longer is on speaking terms with Jerrica.
• Eric Raymond – The one person who makes out like a bandit in all of this, of course, is the corrupt music executive. Seeing the opportunities of the internet, Eric turns the music licensing rights on its head especially on the Misfits in being able to get his lawyer to argue that digital downloads would be a different medium and not allowing many of the older bands to retain any rights. With the money he scoops up, Eric Raymond reinvests the money into burgeoning online advertisement market, reselling and having many of his labels’ bands music re-recorded to avoid paying out more royalties then getting a special distribution deal with YouTube early on. From there he would find new influencers and help grow their career in his new business venture, a sort of in-n-out shop that produced hundreds of brand new one hit wonders. No one likes this guy at all who had been involved with him but he’s nearly untouchable at this stage with his billions of dollars and influence in the media industry.
• The Starlight Girls – Just before the dismantling of the Starlight Foundation, the final act with the remaining money within the SF was given as scholarships to the orphans. Not everyone chose to take the scholarship as a few went on their own to find their careers or trades. The two notable ones that ended up doing something were Ashley, who became a doctor, and Lela who runs her own tech firm in Silicon Valley.
• Riot – When Glam/Hair metal started to die in favor of grunge, Riot attempted to switch genres but was met with a response akin to Vanilla Ice being a white boy doing rap. As a result, the Stingers fell apart and Riot became a club act who tried to find his foot as he continued to age out and his appearance devolved from numerous plastic surgeries that left him looking more hideous. But he could still sing and ended up forming a solo act with various famous musicians, eventually doing nostalgia tours except without his two (in)famous backup musicians
• Rapture/Minx – Both ended up admitting their lesbian love for one another with Rapture conceiving of a ponzi scheme MLM type of business where they swindled upcoming musicians of millions of dollars before a sting (har!) operation uncovered their operation. Both are serving a lengthy sentence in a white collar, minimum security women’s prison where Rapture tries to plan their eventual return.

So what about Jem….meaning Jerrica?

Like many famous 80s artists, once the 90s hit the sounds, fashion and style wore off quickly. Grunge was the primary element demolishing Jem and the Holograms as acts such as L7, Hole, Belly, Veruca Salt, etc. gained ground with the women’s edgier music scene while rap/soul/R&B artists skyrocketed constantly. Jem and the Holograms began being perceived as almost like relics of a period and their distinguishing features diminished. Kimber and Shana had wanted to update their image but Jerrica wanted to maintain a more mainstream appeal at the same time, hoping to connect with younger listeners and send positive messages to kids.

Unfortunately, this was a highly miscalculated error that caused them to heavily lose ground on the music charts. Once a top 40 band, they couldn’t even make top 100 or get any airplay. While Kimber was able to continue to put out music compositions, lyrically they were stale and struggling especially in trying to re-discover their identity. That caused massive financial distress on Starlight Music. But they continued to help produce other artists but most couldn’t make a top 100 anything either, which strained the Starlight Music to the limit.

As the early 2000s came about, the introduction of digital music especially in the form of piracy through software like Napster, LimeWire and Scour.net bit hard into Starlight Music. Seeing what remained of their royalties from music being threatened, Jerrica received consultation from other music industry executives and their lawyers to partake in joining the RIAA and their crusade against these instances of piracy. Along with other musicians such as Lars Ulrich from Metallica, Jerrica (as Jem) got herself involved in these lawsuits but took it a step further by trying to go after individual downloaders at the ISP level. The other Holograms protested what Jerrica thought would be justice as they saw the internet as the future of music, but Jerrica was caught up in the past and the meaning behind Starlight Music. The law fees drained a heavy amount from Starlight Music, leaving them close to bankruptcy.

Around the same time with the growth of the internet, Jerrica failed to see other problems for the Starlight Music business as an online squatter had purchased StarlightMusic.com. She used her corporate lawyers to try to settle the case but it took a great deal of money to purchase the domain name from the squatter (and a few similar ones like TheStarlightMusic.com or StarlightMusic.net).

Because of the financial toll these lawsuits had taken upon Starlight Music, Jerrica made an executive decision to buy out Kimber’s shares of the rest of Starlight Music (effectively pushing Kimber out of the business) so Jerrica could sell the Hologram catalog to Eric Raymond in order to hopefully recoup some of the loss and keep the Starlight Foundation going. Instead, the catalog was sold but the amount after fees and taxes was much lower than Jerrica anticipated, leaving the business bankrupt, forcing her to close the company down as well as the Starlight Foundation. The only remaining money was held in a private fund that was meant by her father to be used in case of emergencies for the Starlight Foundation. As her last act as the benefactor for the Starlight Foundation, Jerrica used the money to give scholarships to the remaining orphans before she was forced to sell off the mansion.

With the Holograms disbanded and her role in Starlight Music nullified, Kimber publicly declared herself a freelance musician and was quickly picked up for a movie in 2002 for the soundtrack. Jealous that Kimber was immediately recognized for her talents, Jerrica had a heated argument with her younger sister that brought out the worst between the two siblings. Kimber denounced Jerrica as her sister after the way Jerrica killed off their family’s legacy and went her own way. She still owned part of the mansion and ended up buying the rest through a 3rd party to deal with Jerrica once Kimber’s royalties from the movie’s soundtrack came through.

However, Jerrica attempted to revise Starlight Music a few times legally as Eric Raymond asked to purchase up the remaining assets, which included Synergy. Jerrica’s crooked accountant helped broker the deal but left himself and Eric a hundred times richer and Jerrica near penniless after taxes and fees. Afterward, Jerrica would take on odds and ends jobs as her reputation in the industry had been heavily tarnished and she had no real hard skills to back her up. While having an MBA from UCLA, Jerrica found that the degree didn’t help her as around that period many companies no longer were demanding high end degrees (except from places like a Harvard, MIT or Wharton) and she would float from office secretary/assistant type of work except she would get sexually harassed often, causing her to go to more blue collar work.

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