Jem and the Holograms and a lesson in botched nostalgia -

(This is the ninth installment in a series that looks at the most fascinating celebrity and pop culture news of the week.)

If you’re going to tap into nostalgia, you have to do it right.

Hollywood repeatedly learns this lesson when fans clamor for a favorite TV show or movie to return…and are then inevitably disappointed by the reboot. However misguided reboots are, there’s usually at least one aspect that makes viewers consider reinvesting. Maybe it’s to see how certain TV actors aged (“Dallas”); to hold out hope that this remake will be better than the last remake (“Batman Begins”); or even seeing old cartoons in CGI (“Alvin and the Chipmunks.”)

But sometimes there’s just a complete disaster. Enter the live-action “Jem and the Holograms,” a movie based on the delightful ’80s Hasbro syndicated cartoon about a music executive (rocking some seriously colorful hair) who doubles as a rock star. The film, which hits theaters this weekend, is an example of truly botched nostalgia.

[We are living in a ’90s nostalgia bubble, and the burst is coming with Nickelodeon’s ‘The Splat’]

Really, the “Jem and the Holograms” adaptation was dead on arrival. Last spring, the movie got a strange, rushed announcement — and Christy Marx, the creator of the original cartoon, said she was given zero notice. Plus, Marx pointed out the oddity of an all-male development team adapting a series about women. Fans weren’t happy: “We’ve waited 29 years for a live action ‘Jem’ movie,” said one writer at io9. “But now every piece of news we hear about this project makes us want to rip out our pink hair and weep.”

The trailer dropped in May with “Nashville” star Aubrey Peeples as Jem, a regular girl who turns into a rock star. The modern twist is that this is thanks to a YouTube video gone viral. She brings her sisters along as her band, but things go south when she’s urged to be a solo act. The trailer was ripped apart by the Internet. The most frequent complaints were: the tone was all wrong; the story looked nothing like the cartoon; there was no sign of rival band the Misfits. The producer defensively urged fans not to judge a movie by its trailer…but what else did they have to go on?

“The project seems to go out of its way to basically an ‘in name only’ adaptation of the show. It offers not a fantastically fabulous young woman and her equally bad-ass rock star friends, but rather a somewhat generic coming-of-age origin story,” Forbes wrote. “It’s a little disheartening to see the often spectacular and occasionally crazy source material turned into another generic ‘young girl doesn’t believe in herself and then gets corrupted by fame’ fable.”

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Naturally, the reviews are brutal. Variety notes that the movie “exists only because of nostalgia for the animated source material. And yet the film seems inexplicably embarrassed by its roots, instead serving up half-baked and self-consciously contemporary drama that no one in the sure-to-be minimal theatrical audience will remember quite so fondly some 30 years on.”

And therein lies the problem. Pop culture nostalgia is a funny thing: It’s often more about remembering an era of life than the actual quality of the work itself. So if you’re going to exploit someone’s memories in order to get them to a movie that will, realistically, never move live up to their expectations, you have to at least treat the project with respect.

Or, just have enough deep knowledge of the original to know that people take these childhood memories seriously. Yes, it actually does matter to people if the Misfits or Synergy the computer aren’t in the “Jem” trailer! That can doom things from the start, just like how “The Giver” never really recovered last year when the first trailer was all in color, unlike the famously black-and-white scenery in the book. If you do a low-budget rush job (as “Jem” appears to be, with a reported budget of just $5 million) of any much-loved project, it only serves to make fans angry, and certainly won’t bring in any new ones.

Nostalgia remakes are pretty commonplace these days, and to really have an impact, viewers can’t be disappointed from the start. Just this week, word got out that Netflix is planning to bring back “Gilmore Girls” with four new mini-movies next year. Though nothing has been confirmed, multiple sources report creator Amy Sherman-Palladino will be writing the scripts and directing. So that should at least calm some nerves. Even if the movies are lame, at least someone who genuinely loved and created the show was behind bringing it back. Once it turned out that the “Jem” creator wasn’t even consulted, it should have been clear right away: The new producers could hype it all they wanted, but this project never had a chance.

(This post has been updated.)

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