Jem and the Holograms: The 1985 Cartoon That Was Truly Outrageous

May 27, 2026 Bobby And Jason

By Bobby Catalano & Jason Pascoe·We were on Dance Party USABobby was already in the Dance Party USA studio when this came out. Jason was a year away. The feel is memory. The facts are research, checked against the record.

Pink hair, wild makeup, star-shaped earrings, and a secret identity powered by a holographic supercomputer. Jem and the Holograms took the 80s obsession with rock stardom, glam fashion, and neon everything and poured it into a cartoon aimed squarely at a generation of kids, with a toy line waiting at the end of every episode. It was “truly, truly, truly outrageous,” and it knew it.

This is the 1985 animated series, not the 2015 live-action movie. Jem (also known as Jem and the Holograms) debuted on November 3, 1985 and ran through May 2, 1988, for 65 episodes across three seasons. It followed Jerrica Benton, a young music-company owner who uses a holographic computer named Synergy to transform into glamorous rock star Jem, fronting the band the Holograms while battling the rival group the Misfits. It was created by Christy Marx and produced by Hasbro with Sunbow Productions and Marvel Productions, built hand in hand with a doll line.

If you came here trying to work out whether the thing you remember is the same thing as the movie you saw advertised, the answer is no. Different decade, different story, different everything. Stick around, because the one you remember is the good one.

The fast facts

Everything below is the short version. The long version is the rest of this page.

Original run: November 3, 1985 to May 2, 1988.
Episodes: 65 total, across three seasons (26, then 27, then 12).
Created by: Christy Marx.
Made by: Hasbro, Sunbow Productions and Marvel Productions. Most of the animation came from Toei Animation in Japan, with AKOM handling 11 episodes and the opening sequence.
How it aired: first-run syndication, not a network. It started life as short segments inside a syndicated Sunday-morning block called Super Sunday, then graduated to its own half-hour show in 1986.
The gimmick: Jerrica Benton touches her star earrings, says “Showtime, Synergy,” and a holographic projection turns her into Jem. Nobody outside her inner circle knows.
The music: three original songs per episode, staged as full animated music videos. 187 videos and 151 unique songs across the run.
The dolls: Hasbro launched the line on February 10, 1986. More than three million sold by September 1987.
How big it got: the number one Nielsen-rated syndicated cartoon in November 1986.
The catchphrase: “Jem is truly outrageous, truly, truly, truly outrageous.”

Who was who: the three bands

Most cartoons of the era gave you a hero, a sidekick and a villain. Jem gave you three functioning bands with names, instruments, personalities and grudges. Here is the roster.

Jem and the Holograms

Jerrica Benton, also known as Jem. Lead vocals. Runs Starlight Music and the Starlight House foster home. Speaking voice by Samantha Newark, singing voice by Britta Phillips.
Kimber Benton. Keyboards, synthesizers and most of the songwriting. Jerrica’s younger sister, and the one most likely to storm off. Spoken by Cathianne Blore, sung by Florence Warner.
Aja Leith. Lead guitar. The steady one. Also voiced by Cathianne Blore, who sang her parts as well.
Shana Elmsford. Started on synth drums, later moved to bass. Left for a while to chase a fashion career and came back. Voiced by Cindy McGee.
Carmen “Raya” Alonso. Drums. Joined in season two, and she is the one who worked out Jem’s secret and chose to protect it. Voiced by Linda Dangcil.
Synergy. The holographic supercomputer Jerrica’s father left behind, and the reason any of this works. Voiced by Marlene Aragon.

The Misfits

The rival band, and the reason the show had teeth. They were not misunderstood. They were genuinely awful people with excellent songs.

Phyllis “Pizzazz” Gabor. Lead vocals, green hair, rich father, zero impulse control. Spoken by Patricia Alice Albrecht, sung by Ellen Bernfeld.
Roxanne “Roxy” Pelligrini. Bass. The muscle. Season two gave her a genuinely affecting storyline about learning to read. Spoken by Samantha Paris, sung by Ellen Bernfeld.
Mary “Stormer” Phillips. Keytar and the band’s actual songwriter. The one with a conscience, which is why the show kept pairing her with Kimber. Spoken by Susan Blu, sung by Lani Groves.
Sheila “Jetta” Burns. Saxophone. British, and a compulsive liar about it. Joined at the top of season two. Voiced by Louise Dorsey.

The Stingers

Season three brought in a third band, which is a lot of band for twelve episodes, but they earned it.

Rory “Riot” Llewelyn. Lead singer, blonde, convinced of his own destiny, and fixated on Jem. Spoken by Townsend Coleman, sung by Gordon Grody.
Phoebe “Rapture” Ashe. Guitar, and a con artist by trade. Spoken by Ellen Gerstell, sung by Vicki Sue Robinson.
Ingrid “Minx” Kruger. Synthesizer, and the most openly predatory character on the show. Spoken by Kath Soucie, sung by Vicki Sue Robinson.

Everybody else who mattered

Rio Pacheco. Road manager, engineer, and Jerrica’s boyfriend. Voiced by Michael Sheehan.
Eric Raymond. The music executive trying to take Starlight Music away from Jerrica, and the Misfits’ manager. Voiced by Charlie Adler.
Techrat. Eric’s tame genius, responsible for most of the sabotage. Also Charlie Adler.
The Starlight Girls. Twelve foster kids living in the house Jerrica’s parents started. Ba Nee O’Carolan carried the most story of any of them.
Clash, Video and Danse. A Misfits hanger-on, a filmmaker and a dancer, all recurring.

Who actually made it, and what Hasbro handed over

The lazy version of this story is that a toy company drew up a cartoon to sell dolls. That is true and it is also about a third of what happened, and the missing two thirds are the reason the show is any good.

Hasbro brought the hardware. The company had doll prototypes already carrying product names, Jem and Rio and Pizzazz among them, and it had decided on the core gimmick: the Jerrica and Jem secret identity, the holographic earrings, the computer behind them, a sister called Kimber and a boyfriend called Rio. That was the brief. Names on a shelf and a transformation trick.

Everything else came from Christy Marx. Marx had been writing G.I. Joe scripts for Sunbow and was, by her own account, roughly the only woman writer on their bench, which is how she ended up recommended for the job of building the series bible, the document every other writer would work from. She was hired to put together a fifteen-segment limited run and given very little direction, which in practice meant she got to invent the world.

The Starlight Foundation, the Starlight House and the twelve girls in it, Starlight Music as a business worth fighting over, Eric Raymond as the man trying to take it, and essentially every relationship that gives the show its shape: all of that is Marx, not Hasbro. The corporate takeover plot that runs underneath three seasons of glitter is a writer’s idea, not a marketing department’s. Worth remembering the next time somebody calls the whole thing a thirty-minute commercial.

A secret identity built on holograms

The premise was pure 80s wish-fulfillment. Jerrica Benton runs Starlight Music and a foster home for girls, and when she needs to become a star, she touches her star-shaped earrings and summons Synergy, a holographic AI her late father built, to project the dazzling disguise of “Jem.” As Jem, she leads the Holograms to fame while keeping her real identity hidden, all while running a business and caring for the Starlight Girls. Secret pop star by night, responsible guardian by day: it was a fantasy tailor-made for its audience.

What made it work better than it had any right to is that the secret cost her something. Rio was Jerrica’s boyfriend, and Rio also fell for Jem, which meant the woman he was dating was competing with herself and losing either way. The show ran that thread for three seasons and never fully let her off the hook for it. That is a strange amount of weight for a program that existed to move dolls, and it is a large part of why people who watched it at seven still argue about Rio at forty.

Underneath all of it sat a straightforward business fight. Eric Raymond wanted Starlight Music. Jerrica had inherited it. The Misfits were his weapon. Strip out the holograms and you have a corporate takeover story with better outfits than most.

Music videos in cartoon form

What set Jem apart was the music. Nearly every episode stopped for full-blown animated “music videos”, original songs by the Holograms or the Misfits, staged with the era’s MTV sensibility. The show essentially delivered a mini music video several times an episode, which made it feel current and cool in a way few Saturday-morning cartoons did. The songs were catchy enough that they were released on records, blurring the line between cartoon and real pop act.

The numbers behind that are genuinely absurd for a kids’ show. The standard format was three songs per episode. Across 65 episodes that produced 187 music videos built on 151 unique songs, and more than 200 original songs were written for the series in total. Ford Kinder and Anne Bryant composed the music. For comparison, most cartoons of the period had one theme song and a library of instrumental cues, and that was the entire musical output.

The performances were not phoned in either. Jem spoke with Samantha Newark’s voice and sang with Britta Phillips’, and Phillips went on to a real career in music, joining the band Luna in 2000 and later recording as half of Dean and Britta. The Misfits had their own singers, Ellen Bernfeld on Pizzazz and Roxy, Lani Groves on Stormer. When two bands squared off in an episode, you were hearing four or five different professional vocalists trading shots.

Remember when the Holograms and the villainous Misfits would face off in some flashy on-stage battle of the bands, each launching into a full animated music video mid-episode, “We are the Misfits, our songs are better!”, while Jem’s earrings flashed and Synergy worked her holographic magic? Those musical showdowns were the whole appeal.

Hasbro understood exactly what it had. The first wave of dolls shipped with a cassette tape in the box, carrying the theme song plus two more tracks by the Holograms or the Misfits. You bought a doll and you got the record. There was no separating the show from the music from the merchandise, and honestly nobody involved was pretending otherwise.

You might remember it as Jewel, or Jam, or Gemma

Here is something we notice constantly. A lot of people who loved this show cannot remember what it was called. They remember pink hair and earrings and a rival band, and they go looking for a cartoon called Jewel. Or Jam. Or Gemma. Or they remember the phrase “truly outrageous” and nothing else at all.

It was Jem. Three letters, rhymes with gem, short for nothing. The confusion is understandable: the theme song sings the word more than it says it, the logo styles it in a way that reads oddly to a kid, and there was never a character actually named Jem in ordinary conversation, because everyone in her life either called her Jerrica or did not know the difference. If you have been carrying the wrong name around for thirty-something years, you are in very large company, and you were right about the earrings.

Season by season

The show did not have a tidy shape. It started as short segments, expanded into half hours, ran long gaps between seasons, and finished on a single episode that aired months after the rest of its season. Here is how it actually went.

Season one: 26 episodes, November 1985 to March 1987

Jem did not begin as a series at all. It began as a set of seven-minute segments inside Super Sunday, a syndicated half-hour block that split its time between Jem, Robotix, Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines and Inhumanoids. The Jem segments ran there from November 3, 1985 to February 9, 1986. The first five episodes as you know them today were assembled out of those shorts, fifteen segments cut together into five episodes, and later versions altered or dropped some of the original footage.

Those first five, “The Beginning,” “Disaster,” “Kimber’s Rebellion,” “Frame Up” and “The Battle of the Bands,” are one continuous arc: Jerrica’s father dies, she inherits Starlight Music, she finds Synergy, the Holograms form, and the two bands fight for control of the label. The Holograms win it.

The season’s other standouts are the three-part Starbright arc, in which the band makes a film to pay for a Starlight girl’s eye surgery, and a two-part story about three of the girls running away after the band neglects them. That second one closed with a genuine hotline number for runaway kids. The season ended with the Glitter and Gold contest at episode 26.

Season two: 27 episodes, September 1987 to January 1988

The longest season, and the one that filled the world out. It opens with a two-part talent search that adds a member to each band: Jetta to the Misfits and Raya to the Holograms. Raya’s introduction is the sharper of the two, because she learns Jem’s secret almost immediately, gets leaned on to expose it, and refuses.

Season two is also where the writing quietly got braver. Roxy, the Misfits’ bruiser, is revealed to be unable to read, and the episode treats it seriously. Kimber and Stormer become friends across the band line, which annoys everyone in both bands. Jerrica has to keep Synergy out of government hands. Episode 14, “Alone Again,” takes on drug abuse and is the only episode in the entire run with no Misfits in it. The season closes on the two-part “Hollywood Jem” and an Oscar nomination storyline.

Season three: 12 episodes, February to May 1988

Short, and structured like a wrap-up whether or not it was meant as one. The Stingers arrive, Eric Raymond buys Misfits Music and signs them to a new label, and the season’s engine becomes Riot’s pursuit of Jem, Pizzazz’s obsession with Riot, and Rio’s patience running out.

Eleven of the twelve episodes aired inside three weeks, February 2 to February 22, 1988. The last one, “A Father Should Be…,” did not air until May 2, 1988, and it is not a band episode at all. It is the search for Ba Nee’s missing father, and it ends with the two of them reunited. That is the final episode of Jem. A foster kid finds her dad, and the credits roll.

Fashion, feuds, and a toy line

Jem was as much about style as story. The over-the-top outfits, the neon color palette, the glam-rock looks of both bands. It was a fashion show with a plot. And the rivalry with the Misfits gave it real conflict: a snarling, punky girl group forever scheming to sabotage the Holograms. Every character, outfit, and instrument was, of course, also a doll or accessory you could buy, making the show a masterclass in the 80s art of the toy-driven cartoon.

The scale of that operation is worth stating plainly. Hasbro unveiled the line on February 10, 1986 at the New York Toy Fair: eight dolls to start, each boxed with a cassette, accessories and a poster, at fifteen dollars apiece, alongside the Jem Star Stage and Jem’s Rockin’ Roadster. Newsday reported the first-year advertising budget at around ten million dollars. This was not a cartoon that happened to have toys. It was a toy launch that happened to have a cartoon.

It worked. By June 1986 Jem was outselling Barbie and the Rockers, which was Mattel’s answer to exactly this idea, and analysts were openly calling the line a real threat to Barbie herself. By September 1987 more than three million dolls had gone out the door.

The dolls are also why the show looks the way it does. Every band member needed a distinct silhouette and color story so a kid could tell them apart on a shelf from four feet away. That constraint is usually poison for design. Here it produced Pizzazz’s green hair, Stormer’s blue, Roxy’s white streak and Jem’s pink, and a cast you can still identify from a single frame.

The 2015 movie, and why fans took it personally

Because it comes up every single time: there was a live-action Jem and the Holograms film, directed by Jon M. Chu, released October 23, 2015. It kept the name and dropped nearly everything else. No Misfits worth the word, Synergy reduced to a trinket, and the whole premise reworked into a music-industry origin story about internet fame.

It did not go well. Made for about five million dollars, it took in less than half that, and Universal pulled it from theaters after two weeks. Critics were unkind and fans were worse.

The reaction was harsher than the movie strictly deserved, and it is worth understanding why. The original show handed a generation of kids a story where the women ran the label, wrote the songs, played the instruments and fought the corporate raider, and the villains were women too, with real ambition and better hooks. Trading that for a discovered-on-YouTube story felt like a downgrade of the actual point. People were not defending a cartoon. They were defending what the cartoon told them.

If you searched for the cartoon and found the film, you did not find the wrong thing by accident. A lot of people have made that exact trip.

Why Jem is still truly outrageous

Jem and the Holograms has aged into a beloved cult favorite, celebrated for its glam style, its catchy songs, and its rare-for-the-era focus on ambitious young women running the show. It inspired comics, merchandise revivals, and a 2015 live-action movie. “Truly outrageous” remains one of the most quotable catchphrases the decade’s cartoons produced.

It was not a cult item at the time, though. In November 1986 it was the number one Nielsen-rated syndicated cartoon in the country, and by 1987 it was the third most watched children’s program in syndication with about 2.5 million viewers a week. It picked up Young Artist Award nominations in 1986 and again in 1988 for Best Animation Series. This was a hit while it was on.

It also refused to disappear. Shout! Factory put all 65 episodes on DVD starting in 2011. Integrity Toys began making collector dolls in 2012 and had produced more than forty different figures by late 2016. IDW ran a modern comic from 2015 to 2017, and the license has moved on to Boom! Studios since. In September 2024 The Loyal Subjects signed with Hasbro to relaunch a batch of legacy brands, Jem among them. Forty years on, somebody is always bringing her back.

Where to watch it now

All 65 episodes are easy to find, and most of the ways to get them cost nothing. As of this writing the full series streams free with ads on Tubi and on The Roku Channel, and it is also available through Amazon Prime Video or buyable as a download there. The complete run is on DVD from Shout! Factory, which is the version to own if you care about picture quality and bonus material. Hasbro has also announced a free service called Hasbro Legends that is meant to gather its classic series in one place, Jem included. Streaming rights move around, so if one of those has gone dark by the time you read this, check the others.

The honest bottom line

Full disclosure: this was a toy commercial. Every episode existed to sell dolls, the songs existed to move product, and the plots bent wherever the new playset needed them to. And inside that machine, real artists smuggled out a show with better music, better fashion and better villains than it had any right to have. The Misfits songs were legitimately the superior product; do not let anyone tell you otherwise. Being born to sell something does not stop a thing from becoming loved.

The animation is inconsistent, the plots recycle, and the moral lessons land with a thud when they land at all. Watch three in a row as an adult and you will see the seams. Watch one, with the sound up, when a music video kicks in, and you will remember precisely why you sat that close to the television.

FAQ

Is this the cartoon or the movie?
This page is about the 1985 animated series, which ran to 1988 for 65 episodes. The live-action film came out in 2015 and is a separate, very different thing.

When did Jem and the Holograms air?
November 3, 1985 to May 2, 1988, in first-run syndication, produced in connection with Hasbro’s doll line.

How many episodes of Jem are there?
65 episodes across three seasons: 26 in season one, 27 in season two, 12 in season three.

Who created Jem?
Christy Marx. It was produced by Hasbro with Sunbow Productions and Marvel Productions, with most of the animation done by Toei Animation.

Who is Jem, really?
Jerrica Benton, a music-company owner who transforms into the rock star Jem using a holographic computer called Synergy.

What is Synergy?
A holographic supercomputer built by Jerrica’s late father that projects Jem’s disguise and other illusions, activated through Jerrica’s star-shaped earrings.

Who were the Misfits?
A rival girl band and the show’s recurring villains, constantly trying to outdo and sabotage the Holograms. The lineup was Pizzazz, Roxy and Stormer, with Jetta joining in season two.

Who sang for Jem?
Britta Phillips provided Jem’s singing voice, while Samantha Newark provided the speaking voice for both Jerrica and Jem.

How many songs were in the show?
The series produced 187 music videos built on 151 unique songs, with three songs the standard in any given episode.

Why was the show unusual for its time?
It packed original songs and music-video-style sequences into nearly every episode and centered ambitious young women, standing out from typical 80s cartoons.

What’s the show’s famous catchphrase?
“Jem is truly outrageous, truly, truly, truly outrageous,” from its theme song.

What was the last episode of Jem?
“A Father Should Be…,” which aired May 2, 1988. It follows the search for Starlight girl Ba Nee’s father rather than the bands.

Jem ran through the exact cable years we lived on air. Jem was one of the most stylish faces of 80s TV, meet the rest in our 80s pop culture icons guide, or hang out with ALF next.