Rejoice, MSTies! Mystery Science Theater 3000 has surpassed its initial funding goal on Kickstarter to bring back the show!

Many of you already know that Joel Hodgson, the original human host of the show, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce an initial offering of at least 3 pilot episodes of a revamped version of the show to shop around to potential producers/distributors. As of  November 16th, they have hit their minimum funding goal of 2 million dollars to produce the first 3 episodes! The Kickstarter will still be up and running until December 12th, in hopes of producing even more episodes in this initial run, with an ultimate goal of 5.5 million to produce a full 12 episode season.

Joel has been providing updates and interviews along the way, making the major announcement that the new human host of the show will be comedian Jonah Ray, known from his work on the Nerdist Network and Comedy Central’s @Midnight. He’s also made it clear that the show is intended to follow a Doctor Who style rotation of major characters, with an endless supply of cheese ball films and freshly changing hosts to fit the current generation.

For those wondering what’s happened to the rest of the cast and writers from the original series, Joel’s answer is a little less concrete. He says that he plans on extending a welcome invitation to all, but that none of them are affiliated with this project at the time being. I can’t deny that I’m very excited for this project, and damn glad to see its funding goal met within its first week, even if the original cast doesn’t show up. The only hard part will be getting past hearing different voices from Crow and Tom Servo!

To check out the rewards or fund the project, check out their page on Kickstarter!

Images: MST3K, Kickstarter