Glamour and glitter, fashion and fame…if you grew up in the eighties and happen to be down a Y chromosome, you probably can sing the rest of that song, the theme song to Jem. The folks out at Shout Factory sent out a little something impressive for us to review for you, namely, the first season of Jem, more recently retitled Jem And The Holograms. And if you’re in the market for a shot of retro animation, then man, are you in the right place.

Jem follows Jerrica Benton, the operator of the Starlight House, a home for orphaned girls, and daughter of the current head of Starlight Records. And when said head dies, he leaves his estate to his daughter. But the rest of the board of Starlight Records, represented by Eric Raymond, a man who not only makes Carter Burke from Aliens look like a god among philanthropists, but on a personal note, makes my skin crawl. Raymond, meanwhile, is not only out to take over Starlight Records and leaves Jerrica out in the cold, he’s out to do it by the most bizarre method possible: by backing a punk band full of big-haired lunatics called The Misfits. Jerrica, meanwhile, has discovered the full extent of her father’s estate, including a computer that specializes in hard-light holography called Synergy. Jerrica uses Synergy to give her and her friends alter egos, which they form into the titular band Jem and the Holograms to secure Starlight Records from The Misfits and Eric Raymond.

Admittedly, I didn’t follow Jem much. As a boy of eight I recall being distinctly annoyed that this “girls’ show” got between me and Robotix. And watching it now hasn’t been much help; Jem and her ilk have not aged well. Looking at this rationally doesn’t help either, with the discovery that The Misfits are actually some kind of insane cult of musical evil. Because come on…how many times have these four nimrods almost killed Jem and the Holograms? And I can’t help but think that all of Jem’s problems would be taken care of–and most of Jerrica’s too–if they’d just press charges on The Misfits for attempted murder. These big-haired wackadoos almost kill that woman more times than I care to count. And for a show geared toward girls age four to ten, roughly, there sure was an awful lot of attempted homicide. And why the hell didn’t Kimber, Jerrica’s sister, put up more of a fight? She’s just as much a Benton as Jerrica, but daddy keels over and where’s her inheritance? I can see that part of the will–”I leave my record company, the charity it’s named after, my holographic supercomputer, my costumes and my antique roadster to my daughter Jerrica. To my other, lesser, daughter Kimber, I leave a raised middle finger because she kept dating that greaseball biker through the tenth grade.”

But despite the sheer lunacy of the show in retrospect, it no doubt has plenty of great memories for those who grew up with Jem, and they likely won’t care how many holes the plot has.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives Jem and the Holograms Season One a seven out of ten, as it does so often with niche products, knowing that for some this will be a dream come true, but for those not living the dream, it will still be a worthwhile watch but with plenty of holes.

Big, BIG news for you retro television buffs today, because the folks out at A&E sent out a copy of Mike Hammer: The Complete Series for me to review for you today. It won’t even hit stores until this Tuesday, so you’ve got plenty of time to get excited, because for retro television fans, detective show fans, and folks who can’t get enough of Darren McGavin, you’re absolutely going to go wild over this.

Mike Hammer: The Complete Series follows the title character, an ace private eye, as he pursues a variety of cases all over the general vicinity of New York City. He’ll find himself pursuing cases, but also pursuing criminals, and even occasionally killing a few of them. He’ll chase blackmailers, murderers, bank robbers, and most anybody else that commits crime in his city.

This is very much a shot of fifties era television–it even feels like fifties era stuff–and if you liked things like The Twilight Zone you’ll definitely get a thrill here. Darren McGavin is a scenery chewer of such excellence that the set designers must have to lace their paint with jalapenos to keep McGavin from wrecking up the joint. And even better, most every episode of McGavin’s Hammer is a meager half-hour (more like twenty-odd minutes), so the mysteries will come very much bite sized and simple to digest. You’ll get dozens of little mysteries here, convenient to break out at most any time of day. They’ll be fast and simple to process, just like most any other sitcom, plus you get the added bonus of them having that retro television spirit that’s extra fun.

And even better, some of the episodes will also pack some humor in. You often don’t see it coming, like when Mike Hammer finds himself abruptly playing secretary / bodyguard for an elderly neighbor who found himself falling into a substantial windfall. Several portions of the episode are surprisingly laugh-inducing, but they’ll quickly turn around into a full-on mystery. Plus, Hammer himself is something of a flirt, and encountering an attractive woman–which he will do with some regularity–often causes him to abruptly, and visibly, switch gears.

Mike Hammer The Complete Series is a rapid and highly engaging affair, giving you the option of taking it a little at a time or in big chunks, and that kind of variety is every bit as helpful as the series is fun and entertaining.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Mike Hammer The Complete Series an eight out of ten for being a slice of delight from the fifties brought forward almost fifty years to a whole new audience. And you should have a great time with it to boot.

Back in the eighties, there were a whole lot of Steven Spielberg movies coming out. They had a lot of common themes, especially kids working together to do unusual things or save people from unusual things. And Super 8, which just hit theaters today, is a lot like a taste of summer from long ago.

Super 8 follows a group of kids filming a movie on the titular media, when a surprise train wreck interrupts their filming. And this alone is big enough news for a group of misfits from Ohio, at least until they recover their camera from the surrounding wreckage and discover that what’s on the crashed train is actually bigger news than the train crash by itself. The crashed train contains something that the Air Force desperately wants to keep under wraps, and they’re willing to go to just about any lengths–including kidnapping, murder and arson–to keep their secret project a secret. The only problem is, the secret project isn’t interested in stay secret itself.

Like a strange intermingling of Cloverfield and The Goonies (which makes sense, given that this was produced by Steven Spielberg and written and directed by J.J. Abrams), all the good parts of both are brought into play here. We’ve got the marginally dysfunctional group of misfits (The Chubby Bossy Kid, The Smart Yet Spindly Nerd, The Kid Whose Mom Died, The Girl From The Bad Family, and of course, The Littlest Pyromaniac) who go off on the grand adventure to save their hometown from the evil government agency. And though these are cliches, they’re cliches for a reason, and here they’re executed masterfully and with just a touch of retro irony. Check out the sheriff’s reaction to the kid at the gas station who just got in one of those new Walk-mans, for just a hint of example.

Sure, it’s not all sunshine and lollipops. Some scenes are way too schmaltzy for their own good. Some of it, much like the characters themselves, is a bit awkward and unsure of itself. Some of the explanations were a bit lacking, like where this thing came from and what it’s doing here, but still, what was here was more than passable and a great way to spend a hot summer afternoon, of which we’ve had a few of those lately and it’s still technically late spring.

The Screenhead Ten Scale in turn believes that Super 8 is giving itself its own score, and agrees sufficiently to give this movie a super eight out of ten, because while it’s not the greatest thing I’ve seen recently, it’s good enough to make it very much worth seeing, and is definitely a lot better than some of what we’ve been sitting through lately.

The folks out at A&E sent over a special treat for us today, folks, and this one’s a full-on doozy. They sent out a copy of Space:1999 Season One, and though the title makes it a raging anachronism, getting a look at what the hopeful souls of 1975 thought we’d be doing with the space program back then is a downright hoot today.

Space:1999 follows a group of astronauts on a lunar colony, when an accident involving nuclear waste storage blasts the moon out of its orbit, thus turning it into the equivalent of a huge, largely unsteerable spacecraft that the crew of Moonbase Alpha now ride upon. Not surprisingly, now that they’re stuck on the flying moon, they also find themselves eventually in deep space, and thus, find themselves also discovering all sorts of new phenomenon, species, and even some societies as part of their huge adventure.

This one is going to be a difficult one to deal with. Finding the nearly twenty one hours required to watch this will be no small task. Science fiction buffs might get along well here, but a good chance exists that the look will simply be too dated to deal with. Retro buffs will patently love this, though, as it’s gone well past “collectible” age and is well on its way to full-bore “antique” status.

The plots are a little on the preposterous side; you’d think that a moon hurtling through space might actually, you know, hit something at some point. Slim chance, yes, but chance all the same. And while I’m at it, I didn’t notice much of an explanation as to how they actually manage to go see any of these civilizations when the moon is literally hurtling through space.

Admittedly, it’s a little–okay, a lot–on the dated side, but the end result here is a fairly engaging dose of retro science fiction, a wonderful study of how writers in the seventies seldom thought about the future, and how their work would be irreparably damaged by the calendar rolling to the year 2000. It can be entertaining at times, even if the overall effect puts you in mind more of “low-budget Star Trek knockoff” than “clever science fiction enterprise”, because it’s willing to do some interesting things. The problem of course, as explained at length above, is that these “interesting things” are poorly explained at best.

If you’re willing to tolerate a really unpleasant look and some thoroughly bizarre plot, well, Space:1999 could be just what you’re looking for.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives Space: 1999 a throughly excellent seven out of ten–it’s an interesting dose of retro science fiction, but if you keep the eye of a science fiction buff, well placed for making retro fans happy.

Hey everybody–but especially everybody out on the West Coast of the United States–I just got word direct from Chance Shirley, the guy who directed that Interplanetary movie we broke here a while back.

Seems that this Friday night, nine PM, as part of the Hollywood ArcLight theater’s Hollywood Film Festival, Interplanetary will be screened.  For you West Coast dwellers in and around Los Angeles, the date at the ArcLight is probably going to be about the only chance you get to catch this one in theaters.

Chance further tells me that the projection and sound mix are going to be absolutely epic on this one, so if you read our coverage of Interplanetary, and got an interest in catching it on the best screen possible, be sure to get out to the Hollywood Film Festival.

Oh, one last thing–Chance also mentioned that, if you’re interested in pre-buying tickets for the event, you can get them right here.