Hollow Movies

This year there's going to be a live-action movie based on the 1980's cartoon, Jem and the Holograms. A trailer has been released, and fans are up in arms.

I didn't really understand the controversy, since the show was after my time. It was my experience growing up that kids watch cartons, but then around the time they get to the teens, they figure they've outgrown them. But by their late teens, they often come back: they've realized that the rest of television isn't that great, and they can use irony as an excuse for why they're watching cartoons even as they enter adulthood. Or maybe they just get high.

So I looked up the show on Wikipedia to try to understand it, and sure enough, it was on during my early teens. As the title suggests, it's about a rock group. But this being an 80's carton, it can't simply be about a rock group: the singer leads a double life using a holographic appearance generated by an advanced computer and projected through her magic earrings. Of course.

But judging by the trailer, the movie chucks all this, and has a straightforward story of teen girls hitting it big in the music biz after a YouTube clip goes viral. It's got themes of being true to yourself and your friends, and looks like an episode of Behind the Music as produced by the Disney Channel. So I can understand why fans of the original show are angry.

The Wikipedia article notes that the trailer for the movie has alienated the movie's target audience. Not so fast, anonymous Wikipedia editor: it's pretty clear the movie is being aimed at teenage girls, not the thirty-somethings who watched the original show. Of course that's more frustrating, since it means the studio might just get away with this cynical rebooting.

But it does bring up a question I've wondered about with this and many other movie remakes: why bother?  I know, most of them make sense. Of the last Batman movie made money, a risk-averse studio will want to make a sequel out reboot. More distant tie-ins like Battleship are less obvious, but they are trying to cope with our fragmented and international media in which it's difficult to promote a movie, so you base it on a game that everyone alive has played.

But Jem and the Holograms was only on for a few years, and unlike contemporaries like Transformers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it didn't really have a lasting media legacy that younger people might recognize. So why would you buy the movie rights to a show young people won't recognize, so you can make a movie for young people? It would make sense if you were buying out for an good premise that you think would appeal to me generations as it did with precious ones. But that's not the case here: they ignored the premise, and used only the name. If your audience doesn't know the brand, why not base it on an all-new concept that you don't have to pay someone to use.

Worse, the people who will recognize the source might be the parents of the target audience. Good luck getting teens to see a movie that gives their patents find memories.