‘Mystery Science Theater 3000’ Kickstarter Hits $2 Million Goal in Less Than a Week

The “Mystery Science Theater 3000” Kickstarter campaign to relaunch the cult TV series hit its initial $2 million funding goal on Monday night after just six days.

Over 18,000 funders pledged money to the reboot, which is being spearheaded by the show’s creator, Joel Hodgson.

This round of funding will go toward creating three new episodes of the show, with the goal being to produce a new 12-episode season. Hodgson also recently announced that Nerdist podcast host Jonah Ray will be one of the new hosts of the show.

The series, which launched on a Minneapolis UHF station in 1988, featured Hodgson and later Mike Nelson and two robot sidekicks as they riffed on cheesy B-movies by providing their own hilarious commentary. It then moved to Comedy Central and finished its run on the Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy) in 1999 after 197 episodes.

“In a world where riffing has become as common as our national pastime, baseball,” Hodgson wrote on the Kickstarter page, “it makes sense: like baseball, everyone knows how to play, but sometimes it feels good to just sit back and watch the original movie riffing team take a whack at it. And if we came back, imagine all the riffs we could make about things like Uber or Cards Against Humanity!”

Nelson and fellow “MST3K” alums Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy currently operate the website Rifftrax, which allows people to download comedy commentary tracks to be played along with mainstream movies like “Godzilla” and “Twilight,” as well as riffs of B-movies. At this time, they are not involved in this project.