Waaaay back when I was not yet old my mom, sister, and I used to watch a lot of cartoons. In particular I remember watching a lot of Thundercats and She-Ra because the satellite broadcasts for those shows were on in the evenings. Once a week five episodes of GI Joe got broadcast in a row also for weekly syndication. Another show we saw on occasion was Jem and the Holograms. There were a ton of others like Silverhawks or Transformers but we didn't watch those quite as often.

I always liked Jem because it was about a bunch of rocker chicks with big hair who were hot for cartoon women. Not only that they wore badass makeup and had pink, fuschia, purple, and various other shades of technicolor hair. I think that's where I first decided that the real world kind of sucks for natural hair colors as compared to animation. Hmm, now that I think of it Macross may have been the first time I noticed that particular fact.

Anyway it was a pretty odd cartoon compared to most everything else out at the time. It had more realistic violence than shows like HeMan or SheRa. It didn't go for the cheap laughs like Johnie Quest. It also had actual character development. That was pretty damned rare for any American cartoon in the 20th century. The show was designed to sell a line of dolls and merchandising but it wasn't as obvious as most shows. I honestly doubt it actually sold that well. Many of the storylines went right over the head of the target audience I'm guessing. Another thing it had in common with Macross was the focus on music. They wrote and recorded a huge number of songs for Jem. I can't think of any other American cartoon with a similar focus.

I had totally forgotten about the whole existence of the show it was so long ago that we used to watch it. Then a few years ago I somehow found some of the Jem songs on mp3 on the net. After listening to them I thought to myself "Man, I'd buy that on dvd." If nothing else it'd be pretty entertaining for irritating others.

Recently they actually did release the whole show in a dvd set. Of course I purchased it. I didn't get around to watching it until this week though. Yet another thing to thank my previous employer for, getting laid off has afforded me a chance to catch up on my dvd backstock. Suprisingly enough the show isn't nearly as banal and crappy as I expected it to be. I've watched like twenty episodes in the last two days while working on the computer. I have definitely decided that I very much miss big rocker hair from the eighties. It also reaffirms my long-held belief that human hair should come in bright colors. Eye makeup like warpaint is a pretty cool thing too.

The fact that I like this show is yet another indicator of my sanity level, or the lack of it. Oh well. It keeps me entertained.

Additional randomness 2004-06-29 You can find anything on the internet. Case in point this. Odds are the link will disappear eventually but here's what the description states.

Up for auction is a pair of purple panties for Shana, from the Jem (and the Holograms) line of fashion dolls from the 1980's.

These purple underpants belong to the first edition Shana doll, released by Hasbro back in around 1985-6.

The panties are in great shape with only the minor wear you'd expect from an item this old.
  

Absolutely hilarious.

I also figured out that the boxed set isn't the whole show. I actually remembered a couple of episodes that weren't on it. I wasn't sure if those were dreams I'd had or what at the time. It turns out that the boxed set was only the first two seasons, and the series was 3 or 4 seasons long. I am always glad when I find out that something I remember was actually real rather than a dream, mismemory, or my imagination.