2015 has been the Year of the Reboot. It hasn’t gone well. 80’s cartoon rocker Jem was given a modern movie spruce up that left loyal Jem fan shaking their heads. Hoverboards were mass manufactured to meet the Back to the Future 2 dream—but all fail to hover or meet safety requirements. With the reboot of Full House to appear next year as Fuller House on Netflix, Year 2 of the Reboot looks even scarier.
5. Jem Movie
As a child, I was not allowed to watch the Jem cartoon series. My parents were devout Christians and Dobson’s Focus on the Family newsletter had dubbed Jem as “satanic.” Jem encouraged girls to behave badly and she cast a spell over others with her music—so in other words, she was the devil. Once Dobson’s decree was announced, there was no way in hell I’d ever be allowed to watch the Jem show or get a Jem doll. The loss of the show didn’t mean much to me but the loss of Jem and her band dolls was a staggering blow. I coveted those dolls with every fiber of my six-year-old body. The dolls had fluorescent colored hair, neon paint crossing their faces and the best new wave clothing I had been exposed to up to that point. Each came with a music instrument; they were colorful and powerful. It was love at first sight.
Jem never happened for me back in the 80’s but out of the blue, it was announced this year that the live action film of Jem would soon premier. Jem’s fabulous clothing and hot pink hair would appear once more and I began to envision a rebooted Jem as a sort of cross between Siouxsie Sioux’s rawness and Blondie’s cool indifference.
That’s as far as my imagination got before the trailer came out. Within a few seconds, every hope was dashed. The Jem of the early MTV era was gone, replaced by a tween with a little bit of pink in her hair.
The movie went on to get terrible reviews and flopped. The millennial incarnation of Jem didn’t work and went down in flames. But I cherish a little dream that someday soon she’ll show up on the big screen with a growling voice and fierce fluorescent hair.
4. Ashley Madison Scam
For those that don’t know, Ashley Madison is an online dating service for people who are in committed partnerships but are looking for an affair. “Life is short. Have an affair,” reads the website’s slogan. In July, the website was hacked and customer profiles were leaked. The release of data caused uproar and panic but in an odd twist, when the data was analyzed it revealed that Ashley Madison was a scam for its straight male users. Gizmodo summed it up: “Ashley Madison aspired to be a global network of people breaking the bonds of monogamy in the name of YOLO. Instead, it was mostly a collection of straight men talking to extremely busy bots who bombarded them with messages asking for money.”
Most of the users were straight men and many of the supposed female users were bots who urged the straight male users to pay more money to have further conversations. The people who were not were not targeted by the bots were straight women and gay people. These groups had a far better chance at establishing a hook-up or relationship with actual people than the straight men did.
Welcome to our glorious adulterous robot future: where companies feed off the money of cheating straight men. I can’t say this is a terrible twist but it is a strange one.
3. Hover boards
In 1989, Back to the Future 2 introduced the idea of hover boards. Despite being styled in the movie as a skateboard for losers, it was hard not to want one. Who doesn’t want to zip around six inches off the ground? 2015 came (the year the movie is set in) and hopes were up. Not up a lot but a little.
What we got was this:
A Segway without handles with no hovering involved. They’ve been yanked from internet retailers due to safety concerns and as 2015 disappears, likely they will too.
2. Reboot Mania
The announcements for new TV shows in 2016 are trickling in and they’re centering around one word—reboot. There will be reboots of Full House, Coach, Gilmore Girls, X-Files, Muppet Show, Powerpuff Girls, Xena, Arrested Development, Celebrity Deathmatch, Duck Tales, and Twin Peaks.
TV networks are hitting the nostalgia button as hard as they can and plunging us into the year of rehashes. While some of those shows look great (can we ever get enough of Gillian Anderson? I doubt it), the rest are doubtful. It’s a shame that in the midst of the Golden Age of Television, TV programmers are doling out past glories in regurgitated style.
1. Patricia Arquette’s Post-Award Interview at the Oscars
Patricia Arquette won this year Oscar’s for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the movie Boyhood. Her acceptance speech ended with a mild avocation on equal right for women. It wasn’t until the post-award interview that things took a downward turn.
The interviewer asked her to elaborate on her acceptance speech and she said, “It’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”
It’s hard to break down just how many things are wrong with this statement but Dr. Nyasha Junior does a fantastic job explaining the densely packed misconceptions that underlie Arquette’s.
Catherine Eaton is a contributor to The Stake. Catherine is a writer living in a western suburb of Chicago. She blogs over at sparrowpost.com and enjoys foraging around the neighborhood in her spare time.
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