The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Kickstarter has come to an end for season 13 and brought in a new record amount for the cult hit show.
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The folks at Mystery Science Theater 3000 wrapped up their second Kickstarter campaign on Friday night with $6,518,912. This surpassed the season 11 total of $6,364,229 by a fair amount.
When the final day of the pledge drive dawned, the campaign had already surpassed the top goal of $5.5M, which prompted a new goal to be set. If the campaign could surpass the 2016 Kickstarter total, a 13th episode would be added to season 13 along with some extra rewards. The goal was achieved, and now it’s off to the races to build streaming and mobile apps for the new Gizmoplex, and, of course, choose 13 new films and 12 shorts to be riffed.
The major driving force being this campaign was Joel Hodgson’s plans to self-distribute through a new streaming service called the Gizmoplex. This will give him more freedom to release the episodes as he sees fit, and allow him to speak with fans directly about keeping the project going. Essentially, so long as people are willing to keep paying, they can keep making more episodes.
Other things fans have to look forward to will include Hodgson again donning the red jumpsuit to host multiple episodes this season. The guys from Riff Trax – made up of other former MST3K actors and writers – will host a live event on the Gizmoplex.
All in all it was a successful campaign, and the theory that you can now self-distribute will be one that we suspect a lot of executives in the industry will be keeping an eye on.
Personally, we just hope that as this is the 13th season, we will finally learn how the hosts trapped on the Satellite of Love eat and breath, and other science facts.
