In 1985, Mattel’s competitor Hasbro launched the Jem and the Holograms television show as a marketing strategy to encourage children’s consumption inspired by the emergent MTV craze. The cartoon preceded Hasbro’s launch of a Jem doll line. Mattel released their own Barbie and the Rockers doll line one month before Jem dolls hit the shelves, and they announced that Barbie would get her first television show. The Barbie cartoon never made it to airwaves and instead two episodes were released straight to VHS and labeled an “extended music video experience.” Nonetheless, both the Jem and Barbie cartoons, and many of the child-centric productions of the 1980s, were the result of the mass deregulation surrounding children’s programming. Simultaneous to the deregulation of children’s programming, backlash against feminist movements of the prior decade was reflected through various media narratives. This backlash existed in tandem with mediated representations of independent, empowered femininity via MTV and hit cartoons such as Jem. This paper explores the unique political-economic circumstances that surrounded the release of the Barbie and the Rockers cartoon and, using textual, narrative analyses of the two cartoons, argues that the animated special acts as an allegory for gendered tensions of the time.