To promote these dolls and add to their musical features, Hasbro brought in their advertising agency Griffin-Bacal Advertising, New York, and Sunbow Productions, a company that was owned by Griffin-Bacal Advertising, and co-produced most of their work with Marvel Productions., and which at the same time was producing cartoons for other major Hasbro toylines like Transformers, GI JOE and My Little Pony.

Hasbro wanted realistic comic book style interpretations of their dolls. They turned to the animation studio head Lee Gunther [executive in charge of production on the Jem cartoon], Gunther in his turn, asked the head of the design team, William DuBay (art director at Marvel Productions in 1984/'85, and art director on the Jem cartoon) for designs based upon Disney's old Snow White animated feature. William was shown prototypes of the Jem dolls by Hasbro, and since no one else in the design team was capable of matching Disney's then fifty year-old designs, DuBay took on the exercise in futility. Knowing the designs were dated when DuBay was producing the art, DuBay pretty much knew they weren't going to fly. Rudy Nebres designed a second set of cels. They pretty much knew that Rudy's designs wouldn't work either, since they were far too complex to be animated. William even brought onboard Paula La Fond [model designer on the Jem cartoon] to make a third set. Paula was the leading female character designer of the day. So, when he brought her aboard, it was with complete certainty that they would end up using her final designs. Paula's designs were altered during the presentation and faces (heads) DuBay created were added. Hasbro watered down the faces until they compromised on what we saw as final on the screen.

Hasbro was looking for a female writer to develop the Jem show, someone who also knew how to do action/adventure. After having worked for Sunbow for a year or so and written five scripts for G.I. JOE, Sunbow approached Christy Marx to develop Jem. Christy was flown to New York to meet with Sunbow, and she was hired.

Christy was given polaroids of the doll prototypes aswell as the first names of the characters from Hasbro. Jay Bacal and the other executives at Sunbow gave Christy the guidelines. Hasbro believed that boys control the TV remote, so they wanted Jem to appeal to both girls and boys, so the boys wouldn't change the channel when Jem came on. Hasbro asked Christy for fashion, romance, glitter, aswell as action, and music videos on top of it all. Christy had a difficult task to perform. This was the first time Christy was able to develop something herself, previously she had worked on shows with already finished character concepts like Spiderman.

Christy was told that the "Truly Outrageous" rocksinger "Jem" was also someone named "Jerrica", who has a holographic computer named "Synergy" and holographic earrings which makes Jerrica become Jem. Jerrica has a boyfriend named Rio, a Roadster, and group of girls in her band called "the Holograms". "Kimber" is her sister and plays keyboards. A group of bad girls in another band are called "the Misfits".

However, the name "Jem" was not yet in use. By may 30, 1985, Jem was still going to be called "M", as in "Music", "Magic" and "Mystique" or even "MTV". At that time there was an "M" on Jem's belt, the Jemstar earrings were shaped as an "M", and Bill Sanders' early drawings of a Jet playset had the "M" logo. One remainder of "M" was left intact though, and can be seen on the Kimber doll's keyboard which has an "M" on top. The reason the name "M" was changed to Jem, was first and foremost because Hasbro couldn't trademark a letter of the alphabet, and so they wanted a name with the same ring to it.

Jem's band went through alot of name changes aswell. Some of the early names for the characters were: Jem/Jerrica = Misty/Morgan. Kimber = Aja. Aja (played drums at first) = Jade. Shana (played bass guitar at first, and the doll actually came with a guitar) = Aria, Chandra, Beverly. Roxy = Rue. Stormer = Rue and Roxy.

Christy wasn't interested in only helping Hasbro sell their toys, she wanted to write things that were interesting, and create the best characters she could and come up with good messages. From the very basic information Christy got, she came up with the characters' full names, relationships, who they really were, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they interacted with each other.

For the last names of Jerrica, the Holograms and Pizzazz, Christy used the last names of famous scientists who were developing holographic technology at the time. Benton = Dr. Stephen A. Benton, Gabor = Dennis Gabor, and Emmett & Leith = Emmett Leith. The villain "Eric Raymond", was named using the first and middle names of Christy's brother. Christy came up with Jerrica's music company Starlight Music, the Starlight House, the Starlight Foundation and the Starlight Girls and most of the details of the series. The Starlight Foundation was a way to give Jerrica/Jem a noble reason behind what she does and to spin off additional stories. Christy also came up with the Jerrica/Rio/Jem love triangle and Hasbro loved it. It added a special dimension to the show that added to making it work as a soap opera, while it also gave another reason for Jerrica to continue keeping Jem's identity a secret. Some of the characters invented by Christy were originally given other names: Ashley = Heather (had red hair). Howard Sands = Howard Garbutt. Zipper = Perve.

Christy wrote down all of the details and created the Jem bible, which was a guide for all of the Jem episode writer's, and contains all the background information the writers would need to write scripts for Jem. The Jem bible was handed out to writers so they could pitch ideas to Christy and Sunbow.

On top of following the Jem bible, the writers needed to make room for two or three songs when writing an episode. They didn't write the songs, but were expected to indicate where the songs would go in each act and give a rough idea of what the song should be about, what takes place during it, or whatever visuals they thought should go along with the song.

The speaking and singing of the characters in the cartoon, were not done by the same people. The speaking voices were done by voice actors in Los Angeles, while the singing was recorded by singers in New York.

Peter Phillips had worked with the song writer Anne Bryant for many years and was told that they were looking for a singer for the voice of Jem. Someone who was not a professional “jingle” singer. He suggested to his daughter Britta Phillips, who was 21 years old at the time, that she should audition. They had everyone auditioning record the Jem theme song, and Britta was chosen as the singing voice of Jem. The theme song on the show is Britta's audition, she only had to sing it once. The other main singing voices were done by Ellen Bernfeld who was the singing voice of Pizzazz, and Gordon Grody who was the singing voice of Riot, Anne Bryant and Ford Kinder did all of the writing of the songs, and Barry Harman wrote the lyrics.

Britta doesn’t read music, so Ford would sit at the piano with her and sing the song. He and Anne would also fill Britta in on what the corresponding storyline was for that episode. She would memorize it as quickly as possible and begin recording.

As for the speaking voices, Samantha Newark was signed to an agency in Los Angeles for commercials, T.V. and film. The agent that represented her at this agency left there and started her own agency and Samantha went along with her. The very first voice-over audition Samantha read for was the character "Jem" at the voice director Wally Burr's studio. As fate would have it, she got the lead and became the youngest member of the cast.

By March 27, 1985, when Christy had written the first draft of the Jem mini-series, which would consist of 15 segments that were each about 7 minutes long. The short segments were first shown on October 6, 1985, as part of "Super Saturday"/"Super Sunday", which was a half-hour block that aired on various television stations along with other short segmented series like "Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines", "Robotix", and "Inhumanoids" which were all based on "boy-toys" and were very action-oriented and for a boy audience.

The cartoon begins with Jem and the Holograms getting introduced one by one as they exit a flashy car on the street with screaming fans. Then Jem thinks back on how it all began after the death of Jerrica's father, when he left behind two inheritances, a music company, Starlight Music, and a home for foster girls, Starlight House. The foster home is need of money, but the other half of the music company was left to Eric Raymond, who has taken complete control of the entire company and plans to take the company into his own direction, by promoting bands like the loud and noisy Misfits. Jerrica is left in the cold, without any money to support the Starlight Foundation and it's foster girls. Until... another opportunity arrives for her in the shape of a little box, that reveals the best inheritance of her father, the holographic computer Synergy.

The Jem doll line was going to be the next big thing from Hasbro after their successful toylines like Transformers, My Little Pony and G.I.Joe. The 1986 Hasbro toycatalog, which featured only Jem on the cover, introduced the dolls to the toy market and revealed Hasbro's very promising intentions: "With the tremendous growth of music videos and their strong influence on today's youth, Hasbro has developed Jem, a new fashion doll and a truly outrageous rock star". "In addition to the lively animated television series, the Jem line will be supported by dynamic commercials and an agressive advertising campaign, aswell as premium and promotional support programs!".

The colorful dolls, with their realistic bodyshape, creative fashions, and imaginative playsets, were a success! And the doll line expanded to release twice as many dolls the following year, with an updated look, along with new fashion lines and playsets. Yet again Jem was the covergirl for Hasbro's official toycatalog.

The Jem cartoon strengthened the statement even further, that Jem is truly outrageous! With it's beautiful animation and combination of romance, drama, adventure, humor, action, all mixed into one, it appealed to both girls and boys, and added to it's brilliance with the music videos and high quality songs like never before (or again) heard in a cartoon. Out of the four "Super Saturday"/"Super Sunday" cartoons, Jem proved to be by far the most successful, and only Jem and Inhumanoids went on to be expanded into independent full-length animated TV-series.

The original segments were reworked by bundling them togheter into 5 x 22 minute episodes, and extended scenes were added to fill out the time. Then it was time to create new episodes, for which the characters received a bit of an improved re-design.

The series first 22 minute episode aired in April 7, 1986. As it was keeping up with the dolls released in the doll line, Christy Marx was in charge of introducing new characters to the show, like Video, Clash, Danse, Raya, Jetta, Riot, Rapture, and Minx. Hasbro wanted focus to be on the characters that were available as dolls. They even turned some of Christy's creations into dolls, the Starlight Girls: Ashley, Ba Nee and Krissie.

At the beginning of the series, Christy had had her hands full doing the development and writing a bunch of scripts, so Roger Slifer handled the story-editing on the scripts Christy didn't write. But starting third season, Christy split the story-editing with Roger.

The show developed a depth unusual for a cartoon, and was able to even handle issues like orphanage, sickness, friendship, death, insecurity, charity, drug addiciton, illiteracy, injury recovery, poverty, world hunger and more, while remaining entertaining.

With all it's "outrageousness" Jem dolls were apparently too different from other dolls that had been around for a while. And Jem was already a certain character, with wild hair colors and a rockstars. Jem couldn't suddenly become a princess, a ballerina, or a nurse, like Barbie. Hasbro tried solving this by introducing new characters.

Despite Hasbro's attempts with new ideas like the Glitter 'n Gold line, for which they even used a codename "Ruby Red" to prevent other toy companies like Mattel from stealing their ideas, Mattel caught on pretty early with their more harmless version of Barbie as a rockstar. Other knock-offs were Spectra, also by Mattel, and Lace by Creata. On top of that, these other doll lines were cheaper than the Jem dolls. The Jem dolls bigger size also meant a lot of other dolls clothes didn't fit them, and parents also didn't want to spend their money on a new and more expensive format.

Apparently the Jem doll sales weren't what Hasbro had hoped for. The cartoon was based on the dolls, and paid for by Hasbro who made the dolls, and only to sell the dolls. When they toys failed, Hasbro had no reason to continue backing a cartoon.

Christy and the others knew that the series was ending. It's common to begin a TV-series with an order of 13 episodes, then order another 13 = 26, and then if it does well, enough for 65, which is a standard number of episodes for a full syndication order. The 65th episode of Jem was approaching, and when they got into the third season, the word finally came down that the series would end, and Christy had the rare opportunity to write what she knew would be the final episode. It was 1988, and Christy had spent three years of her life creating Jem. It was an emotional script for her to write, and she was saying her own farewell through the voice of Ba Nee in the very last scene.

The last episode of Jem was aired on May 2 1988. Christy's opinion was that Hasbro gave up way too soon. She still feels that Jem is one of the best shows she has had the pleasure to be a part of, and that it was a wonderful experience.

As for some of the other Hasbro/Sunbow shows at the time, G.I. Joe made it 86 episodes, while Transformers was canceled after 111 episodes.

Hasbro had many plans for Jem that never made it to the market. Some were revealed in the 1988 preview catalog of their upcoming toys, and some further ones were sent out pictures of to the cartoon writers, to be used when developing the characters, some of which actually made it to the last few episodes of the cartoon.

Dolls that were planned was Rockin' Romance Jem, American Beauty Jem, Astral, Regine, Riot, Rapture, Minx, and a new character that never got introduced was Graphix, which would have been a tagger, another nuisance hanger-on to the Stingers and Misfits.

There was even plans for a Jem movie at one point, as had been done previously with Hasbro's other brands GI Joe and Transformers. But with the poor results of those movies, the plans for the Jem movie didn't get beyond a basic outline by Christy. It was to include a couple of twins which were a musicteam called the Mongrels and their synthesizer Entropy, a masculine counterpart of Synergy invented by Techrat, which puts people in a form of trance. Characters that were to appear in the movie were Jem and the Holograms, the Misfits, the Mongrels (Alex and Alyx Couto), Synergy, Rio, Eric Raymond, Anthony Julian, Techrat, Joanie, Mrs. Bailey, and the Starlight Girls.

Apparently Hasbro wanted a doll line for the US market (they already had Sindy for Europe), and thought they could fix everything that went wrong with Jem, by making a second attempt. Maxie was a doll line consisting of a blonde high school girl and her friends. The dolls were more similar to Barbie in size, and there was even a 32 episodes long cartoon show called "Maxie's World" with some music in it.

Infact Maxie had several things in common with Jem, as Hasbro seem to have used some of their ideas for Jem on Maxie instead, and even molds for dolls and accessories. The line only lasted three years though, and before it ended Maxie was even planned to get her own rockband, much like Jem.