In the 80’s, MTV had taken over the world with flash music videos and fashion. Deciding to cash in on the MTV craze, Hasbro created a line of rock star dolls with flashy clothes and up to date music. Jem was introduced all over the world in a weekly half hour cartoon series complete with stories and MTV like music videos.
The basic story was about a woman named Jerrica Benton who upon her father’s death inherits his music company, Starlight Music, and a secret sophisticated computer named Synergy that could generate realistic holograms. To prevent a hostile takeover of Starlight Music by a man named Eric Raymond and a rock band called The Misfits, Jerrica used Synergy to transform herself into Jem, a glamorous rock star. She was aided by her band the Holograms that consisted of her friends Kimber, Aja, and Shana who knew who Jem really was. Jerrica had a boyfriend named Rio who didn’t know that she and Jem were one in the same person and subsequently fell in love with both women. This was the story for the first five episodes that were also made into a video release called “Truly Outrageous”. Subsequent episodes contained the adventures of Jem and the Holograms and The Misfits and each episode contained two to three songs performed in MTV music video format.
The show aired from 1985 to 1987 in a total of three seasons for a total of 65 episodes. New characters were introduced in later episodes and some were made into dolls, and many of the fashions that appeared on the show also became fashions for the dolls. The cartoon appealed to the little girls who wanted to be Jem and be loved by her very own Rio (with the exception of me because I was crazy about Riot from the third season). But Jem didn’t just appeal to the young girls of the MTV generation. Young guys were also intrigued by these beautiful young women rock singers!
Despite the fact that Jem became a very popular television show, the dolls just were not selling and in late 1987 Hasbro pulled the plug on the existing dolls, dolls they had planned, and the cartoon.
