Truly Outrageous

Just saw the trailer for the new Jem and the Holograms movie. Now I never watched the original show and I didn't even know it existed until about a year or 2 ago (the closest I've come to seeing footage of it was the Nostalgia Chick episode). When I heard they were gonna do a movie I actually thought it was a clever idea. A fun, 80's campfest, girl power extravaganza would at least be something different than all the meaningless action movies and Seth Rogan comedies we get nowadays. But oh boy was I wrong. The trailer sucked, hard. And people might think that it shouldn't piss me off because I have absolutely no connection to the original Jem, which I do not. But somehow this thing manages to infuriate me. I think it is more of a principle thing more than anything else.

What Jem: the Movie is doing is stripping everything unique about the original.The plot seems so formulaic I swear I've seen it a million times. Person wants to be a musician, gets famous, forced to become someone they aren't. C'mon, I think that describes at least a dozen Disney Channel original movies©. It's so bad that there aren't even any holograms! You think a movie called Jem and the Holograms would at least have a hologram or two. I'm pretty sure Michael Bay's Transformers kept more of the feel for the old 80's cartoon than this does (and that's saying something).

Even when you make a remake or reboot of something, you should still keep SOMETHING that bares a resemblance to the original. Take Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy. Yes, it was different than any Batman movie audience's had seen before, but it also kept (some) of the essence of who Batman was. Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, Catwoman, the Joker they were all there. Bruce still went through similar events that he went through in the comics (the death of his parents, training in Japan), but they were done with a new twist. If you take a popular franchise or character and make a movie that makes that franchise or character unrecognizable you end up with something like the Super Mario Bros. movie or the 90's Godzilla. And we all know how they turned out.

It might seem a little judgy to say that they "destroyed Jem" just from watching the trailer, but I don't see what could possibly happen in the movie that would surprise anyone. If the movie is closer to the source material than the trailer shows, I gotta question whatever marketing department put this turd together because the main audience for this is kids who grew up watching the show, and this trailer is not going to get them in the theaters.

-Matthew