10 Movies That Completely Missed The Point

Last year’s live action adaptation of the 1980s cult classic cartoon and toy phenomenon Jem & The Holograms rewrote the lead character as a teenage pop wannabe whose songs become YouTube sensations, and who’s offered a massive major label record deal as a result.

Faced with fame, wealth and stardom, she must come to terms with how her new life corrupts and destroys her relationships with her sister and childhood friends, and rediscover what it means to just Be Herself.

By contrast, Christy Marx’ original 1980s cartoon followed adult record company owner Jerrica Benton, who used a state-of-the-art audio-visual synthesiser named Synergy - a computer that creates incredibly lifelike holograms - to lead a double life as Jem, fronting pop sensations the Holograms.

As well as a hugely successful businesswoman who saved her deceased father’s record label from bankruptcy, Benton’s also a philanthropist who runs a foster home for disadvantaged young teenage girls, and Synergy’s avatar was programmed by her father to resemble her lost mother. The whole show is a paean to empowered women, and Jem/Jerrica are written to be role models to the impressionable little girls who buy the dolls and watch the show.

Contrast that with the belated movie version, and it’s vague, compromised declarations of ‘girl power’. It’s just yet another story of how girls can’t be trusted not to be swayed and misled by money and status, and have to be led back to the right path - in this case, by some witness scavenger hunt set up posthumously by Jerrica’s father.

It’s leftover storyline scraps of every craptastic Disney Club story of pop stardom, retaining none of the vital, empowering subtext of the original and singing yet another cover version of the tired old sexist standard, ‘when women become successful, they turn into bitches, amirite?’ 2015 Jerrica is thrilled to be signed to the biggest record company in the world; 1985 Jerrica owned that company.