First of all, it has come to my attention that 1989 was 30 years ago. How can simple math and the passage of time hurt my feelings so much? Is it because I’m still sick and in a weakened state?

Here’s the thing about my day: it sucked. It sucked in boring ways that a grey, Monday in January will suck. Work was annoying, things went wrong, and people didn’t listen to me, which I can kind of understand because I sound like Peter Brady singing “Time to Change” after making out with a carton of Newports and a gallon of Jim Beam for a week.

However, today my new toys arrived and I gotta say even though I know capitalism is all about conning us into buying shitty things to shove into the holes in our souls caused by being cogs in the corporate machine, sometimes it totally works.

I had a Jem & Pizazz shaped hole in my soul and for the low, low price of $15.99 + shipping my hole has been perfectly filled.

Plus, it came with some of that big bubble wrap and I squeezed every one of those air-filled blisters until it popped. I was simultaneously annoyed and amused.

The post Day 167 of 200: Let Me Tell You About My Day appeared first on I Will Dare.

When I got Jem & The Holograms Vol. 1: Showtime for Christmas it filled me with a combination of anxiety and awe. In my hot hands, a Jem & The Holograms comicbook! In my crusty old brain, the recent attempt to bring Jem to film. Gah! What if they fucked it up again? Would my nostalgia and outrage centers ever recover?

No, they would not. I would be a fist-shaking old lady whenever someone mentioned Jem forever and ever and that would be the saddest of the sad. Or close to it. Nothing can top Sarah McLachlan singing and pictures of abused puppies.

This comicbook reboot of the beloved 80s cartoon is not only the Jem & The Holograms we deserve, it’s better than the original. How could that be, you ask? First is always best? Ask any Star Wars nerd.

Wrong.

Here’s how this reboot is better: representation, representation, representation.

Sure the cartoon had a diverse cast for the 80s, but they were all incredibly thin beautiful stick figure characters. Not so in the comicbook. Instead we see a wide range of body types and the best part? It’s not even discussed. It’s just the bodies these women happen to incorporate. There is no side story about Stormer’s thick thighs. There’s no mention of how Aja wears crop tops that show her unperfect-by-magazine-standards belly. It is glorious.

Also? Kimber is a lesbian and she has the hots for Stomer. So much delectable drama.

And another thing I loved? Jerrica and Kimber refer to Aja and Shana as their sisters. Not adopted sisters, not foster sisters, just sisters. They never use a descriptor. As someone who is a half-sister but never called a half-sister it’s an issue I am sensitive about, and I hate when I read/watch anything where someone is referred to as an adopted or half sibling. People who have adopted or half siblings don’t refer to them that way. Those who are don’t refer to themselves that way. It’s a weird form of othering and it perplexes me why writers need to impart this information. Are they trying to make someone less than? I don’t get it.

It’s one of my main complaints about the TV show “Supergirl.” Kara (Supergirl) refers to her family as foster mom, foster sister constantly and it drives me nuts.

Okay, I got a little sidetracked there.

Back to Jem & The Holograms and this fun, fun, fun comicbook. This first volume, which collects the first six issues, is the origin story. We get to meet the women, see how they stumble onto Synergy and get the bitchen earrings. We start to learn their personalities. We also get to meet glorious, destructive Misfits and green-haired, stompy lead singer Pizazz. Oh, how much I loved reading this book.

In this one The Misfits are one of the biggest bands on the planet and Jem & The Holograms are up and comers who capture a lot of attention by releasing a music video that goes super viral. This, of course, pisses of Pizazz because she cannot have anyone stealing her thunder. Also, she’s not so thrilled about Stormer’s affection for Kimber.

Anyway, there is, of course, an upcoming battle of the bands thing where The Misfits will face-off against The Holograms. Mishaps ensue.

What this book does so well is balance real, genuine emotion with the 80s-cartoon madcap cheesiness so that it’s satisfying and fun at the same time. Not only do we have the Kimber/Stormer stuff there’s also the Jem/Jerrica/Rio triangle from the 80s cartoon. Only this time Rio’s a music journalist and not some weird hanger-on. Also, he’s not a big fan of Jem. I’m sure much more will be made of skepticism toward the lead singer as the story goes on.

I already cannot wait for Volume #2. This one has skyrocketed up the ladder next to Saga as the book I most hotly anticipate.

The post Now This is the Jem & The Holograms We Deserve appeared first on I Will Dare.

I discovered the magical hair bleaching properties of peroxide the summer of 1987. We started out using Sun-In, but soon discovered that peroxide was way cheaper. This a vital detail. Remember it. We’ll come back to it in a minute.

The trailer for the live-action Jem & The Holograms movie was released today. It is full of suck. It’s a shitty repackaging of that one episode of “Saved by the Bell” where Zack & the Bayside crew form a band but then Zack falls under the spell of a sexy music promoter and becomes Vanilla Iceesque and dumps his friends only to remember that friends are the reason for living. And making music, apparently.

You can watch the trailer, but I wouldn’t advise it.

I’ve been begging for a reboot of Jem & The Holograms since August 18, 2009. And I was wrong. I take it all back. I want this to be erased from the pop cultural context forever and ever.

Jem & The Holograms was one of those things that hit me right where I lived. It was rock & roll and pink hair and sparkles and superheroes presented in a way that totally appealed to me. It was a cartoon about girls, which was hard as hell to find in the after school cartoon catalog.

I loved Jem so much I dressed up as her for Halloween 1987 and Halloween 1988 and Halloween 1989. When you find a good thing you stick with it. Because I had peroxide blonde hair the pink hairspray stained my hair, leaving me with cotton-candy colored streaks and earning me the nickname Jem, which followed me on and off through most of high school. And I kind of loved that.

Who wouldn’t want to be a smart, rich rock & roll star with magical earrings, a bitchen computer, and a band of super-talented women? Fuck, that was like the dream. The actual dream.

This movie is not the Jem & The Holograms I wanted. This is not the Jem & The Holograms GenX women and Millenial women and young women of today deserve. We deserve the rock & roll superhero that was Jerrica Benton/Jem. We deserve magical earrings and supercomputers and actual CGI-ed, big budget holograms. We deserve women who make decisions and care about each other and real female friendships. We deserve the motherfucking Misfits wreaking havoc all over the place.

We deserve a musical landscape where two bands full of women are the biggest thing on the fucking planet. We deserve this in real life too, not just in a Hollywood dreamland.

Instead we get cliche pap we’ve seen a million times and was never very good to begin with.

This is worse than that time they tried to turn A Prayer for Owen Meany into a movie. Hollywood continues to ruin everything.

The post We Deserve Magic Earrings, Misfits, and Rock & Roll Superheroes appeared first on I Will Dare.

The Hub is showing Jem & The Holograms, and you can bet your sweet ass I’m Tivoing the shit out of it. In fact, I happened to catch a mini-marathon yesterday morning. It’s been decades since I’ve seen the original series, and I was taken aback by just how evil The Misfits are. I’m all for petty shenanigans and trash talk, but these bitches don’t mess around. To wit, here are the ways in which The Misfits and/or Eric Raymond tired to kill Jem and/or The Holograms (this does not include the two or three kidnappings):

• The Misfits throw musical instruments at Jem & The Hologram’s as they drive high-speed down a freeway
• The Misfits try to run the Holograms’ roadster off a cliff
• A thug (The Thug) hired by Eric Raymond sets the Starlight House, where Jem & The Holograms live, on fire
• One of The Misfits attempts to run over Jerrica Benton with some sort of tractor
• The Thug plants a bomb under a couch cushion at the mansion Jem & The Holograms relocated to after the fire at Starlight House
• The Misfits attempt to drive the yacht Jem & The Holograms are partying on into some sort of large ship
• While filming a video in Paris, Jem is nearly smushed by a gargoyle that plummets from the building after The Thug loosens it
• Jem is caught in the middle of an electrical fire caused after The Misfits storm off the set of an interview with a famous VJ
• Aja is stuffed in the baggage area of a bus

The post Attempts made on Jem and/or The Holograms’ lives during the first six episodes appeared first on I Will Dare.

Today, I was tweeting about the therapeutic properties of Hacker Typer which lets you pretend you’re a movie or TV hacker. It spits out fauxcode while you press keys on your keyboard. Try it, and you’ll see what I mean.

Steve asked what in the hell it actually did and I thought it started a game of Global Thermonuclear War (#3). Then I went on to tell him how I had watched Matthew Broderick’s early classic “WarGames” in 8th grade math class. I intended my next line to be “which is why I can never balance my checkbook.” (#4)

But I paused. Do people still balance checkbooks? Will people under, oh, the age of 25 get that at all? Do they even have checkbooks?

I can’t remember the last time I balanced a checkbook. It might have been in the mid-90s, maybe. I often eschewed checkbook balancing because it was entirely too depressing. Why bother when you were sure you were down in a hole (sing NIN’s “Head Like a Hole here. #which will not be named)? By the time I actually had money, I could easily check my balance online.

So now I wonder, what kind of lame reference can people make to show that they are bad at math and it’s all to blame on the fact that they watched “WarGames” and “Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land” (#6) instead of learning fractions?

Of course, all this reminded me of the time I turned to my much younger co-workers at The Nerdery and asked if my Weezer/Buddy Holly (#7) reference was too dated.

And to make matters even worse? Last week while I was babysitting Nolan, who was recovering from some sort of Tibble ailment, we were coloring. He was doing some sort of Super Mario picture and I was coloring one of Jem (#8).

“Is that Lady Gaga?” he asked.
“No,”I said. “It’s Jem.”
“It looks like Lady Gaga.”
“Jem came way, way before Lady Gaga.”
“Oh, so she’s old,” he said.

Damn.

Generally growing old doesn’t bother me. I’m quite grateful that I get to be this age (whatever age that might be), because people I love didn’t ever reach this age.

But being reminded of the fact that I’m hopelessly out of date? A relic, even? That’s some cold ass shit.

The post All My References Date Me appeared first on I Will Dare.