Factory want to reboot cult classic Mystery Science Theater 3000, there’s a catch: they need the help of fans to crowdfund the show. Just about an hour after launch, they’re nearly to ten percent of the initial $2 million goal, so it should be money well spent. The $2 million will cover production costs to make three new MST3K episodes, which Hodgson will then take and shop around to networks and online platforms.
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Joel Hodgson, co-creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000, has announced the show will be returning.
“We’ve been talking about doing this for five years now, so it’s taken a long long time to get it to happen”, explained Hodgson during an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
If the fundraising campaign is successful, the Mystery Science Theater team could start a new run of up to 12 feature-length episodes next July, depending on the amount of donations over the next month. It eventually moved to The Comedy Channel (soon to be known as Comedy Central) and later, The Sci-Fi Channel (soon to be known as SyFy).
For Hollywood, Kickstarter has an innate attraction: financial backers don’t have to guess whether a certain property has an audience, they can find out immediately using the site. “‘Mystery Science Theater’ has already refreshed itself once with a completely new cast, so I think it deserves to do that again”.
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There’s no word yet if Tom Servo and Crow’s original voice actors will reprise their roles, though Hodgson confirmed on Kickstarter that there will be one new host and one new “Mad” to torture the spacefaring movie-goers. We see that there’s still tremendous untapped potential for the “MST3K” brand. You might be wondering why were getting more MST3K episodes now and not at any point in the past 16 years after its cancellation. He mentioned that not only was this a way to get new episodes out to fans, but he hoped that it would bring a few of the old cast and crew back together to work on the show in various ways. So far the campaign is more than halfway to the first benchmark and by contributing through Kickstarter, fans have the opportunity for rewards based on their donations. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the series replaced people in front of or behind the camera, but longtime MST3K fans know that people can be picky about their preferred cast members.
