Thanks To Kickstarter, ‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ Is Officially Coming Back! 14 Episodes Will Air Next Year
Thanks to Kickstarter, Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans can expect 14 new episodes of the 1990s cult classic next year, Yahoo News is reporting.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 nabs $6 million in record crowdfunding campaign https://t.co/SxVkMk4oNq by @DelRey pic.twitter.com/Cii0KHpogX
— Re/code (@Recode) December 12, 2015
Mystery Science Theater 3000, for those not familiar, was a television show that began in 1988 on KTMA, a low-budget Minneapolis TV station. Producer Joel Hodgson starred as a janitor trapped on a spacecraft (the Satellite of Love), who builds three robot companions for himself — Tom Servo, Gypsy, and Crow. Joel and the robots would watch awful B-movies and offer snarky commentary — a process called “riffing.”
Despite its weird concept and shoestring budget, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (shortened to MST3K by fans) was a hit with audiences, eventually making its way to Comedy Central and, later, the Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy), before being cancelled in 1999.
Hodgson has been angling to get Mystery Science Theater 3000 back on the air for some time now, and plans for a revival got a much-needed shot of adrenaline back in November, when Shout! Factory bought the rights to the show. Shout! Factory is a TV, movie, and music distribution company that buys the rights to forgotten — but beloved — properties (such as Freaks & Geeks and SCTV) and then packages them and releases them for sale to the general public.
Getting a distribution deal was one thing, but producing new episodes of the show was another matter entirely. It required something that neither Joel Hodgson nor Shout! Factory had: money, and lots of it. Enter Kickstarter.
Kickstarter, like GoFundMe and IndieGoGo, is a “crowdfunding” site — that is, the general public pledges money to a cause, and the site acts as a broker, getting the money from the donors to the recipient. While GoFundMe tends to focus more on regular people and their struggles (for example, raising money for accident victims), Kickstarter has more of an artistic and commercial bent, and has raised money to get inventions and artistic projects off the ground.
It was the perfect vehicle for Hodgson to raise some cash.
And raise some cash it did! As of this writing, the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Kickstarter has officially become the most successful Kickstarter campaign of all time, having raised $5.76 million (the previous Kickstarter record-holder was the successful 2013 campaign to fund a Veronica Mars movie, which raised $5.7 million).
Begun on November 10, the Kickstarter didn’t have a specific funding goal in mind — rather, it offered only as many new episodes as it raised money for. As Joel promised in his video, if the campaign raised $2 million, there would be three new episodes; $3.3 million would bring in six new episodes; and so on (“There’s a geometry to it,” as Tom Servo said in the video). $5.5 million was enough to ensure a full 12-episode season.
Thanks to the $5.76 million raised on Kickstarter, plus about $600,000 raised through merchandising and a telethon (described by UPI as “in some ways worse produced than the cheesy movies the series is known for riffing”), the actual budget for the revival tops out at over $6 million, enough for 14 episodes — one of which will be a holiday special.
“You did it: you brought back MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000! Thanks to you, MST3K will be able to shoot FOURTEEN NEW EPISODES next year, including a new holiday special!”
Some big names in the movie and TV industry, including Patton Oswalt, Felicia Day, Baron Yount, and possibly even Jerry Seinfeld and Jack Black, have signed on to make appearances in the upcoming season.
As of this writing, it is not known when filming of the new season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 will begin, when the show will air, or how the show will air (whether on cable — and if so, which network — or as a web series).
[Image courtesy of enigmabadger via Flickr by Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)]
