MST3K Kickstarter Breaks Crowdfunding Records
The Kickstarter campaign to revive Mystery Science Theater 3000 wrapped up Friday night, with $5,764,229 raised via Kickstarter. Combined with the revenue raised via the campaign’s “add on store,” the combined crowdfunding total ended up being over $6.3 million dollars.
The Kickstarter funds alone make the MST3K campaign the most successful Kickstarter in the Television and Films category (beating Veronica Mars soundly), and the combined total makes this the most successful television or film project in Crowdfunding history.
Since the campaign reached $6.3 million, fans will now get to see fourteen new episodes of the show. It’s especially impressive once you consider that the fourteenth episode stretch goal was added in the last hour of the campaign.
The final push came during a technical glitch ridden telethon Friday night. It started a half hour late, streams kept dropping out (I had to reconnected half a dozen times between two Youtube channels), and microphones only seemed to function about 60% of the time… but it was magical.
Some writers have misreported the final jump in numbers as a miracle donation, but that really wasn’t the case. While (eventually) the Kickstarter numbers were automatically updating on the total, any money from the add-on store had to be manually typed into the telethon’s total. As that number was only updated twice during the evening, it made it look like a sudden jump at the end of the event.
Here are a couple of our favorite moments from the telethon:
