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. It’s not clear where the new episodes will be released, but MST3K apparently has enough fans willing to take that risk.
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Viewers of this year’s MST3K Turkey Day marathon were greeted by creator Joel Hodgson launching a Kickstarter campaign to revive “Mystery Science Theater 3000” as a crowd-funded television series.
For the uninitiated, MST3K stars Hodgson as a janitor who’s sent to outer space and forced to watch crappy movies-and sarcastically comment on them-alongside robot sidekicks he built himself. Each episode featured a B movie in its entirety with running commentary from the gang on the Satellite of Love. 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. As Recode notes, the campaign appears to now hold the title for most funding ever given to a video project, just edging out the $5.7 million earned by the Veronica Mars movie project. In addition, other stars have promised to guest star or cameo on segments, including Jack Black, Jerry Seinfeld, Mark Hamill, Bill Hader, Neil Patrick Harris and Joel McHale.
The current donations guarantee a bonus 13 episode season, including a new holiday special, hopefully in the same league as Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
Introduced the next cast: Jonah, Felicia, Patton, Hampton, and Baron.
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“It’s about convincing a “conference table full of executives” to give our show a home, so that we can make a lot more seasons”, he said. “It’s NOT TOO LATE for U-2 help #BringBackMST3K How great would it be 2 see @JoelGHodgson & crew in ALL NEW episodes?” wrote Hamill on Thursday.
