Netflix has become a foster home of sorts for resurrecting our favorite long-dead shows. Add to the list, under Fuller House and Gilmore Girls, Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Netflix announced the acquisition of the MST3K revival with a GIF posted to social media featuring the iconic silhouettes of the robot movie critics against the Netflix logo on the big screen. The new season will consist of 14 episodes and will appear on the streaming platform on a yet-to-be announced date in the “not too distant future.”
In the not-too-distant future. @MST3Kpic.twitter.com/L9IpZW2Cmb
— Netflix US (@netflix) July 24, 2016
The revival of the B-movie riffing comedy show has been in talks since early 2014, and creator Joel Hodgson took to Kickstarter in November to raise the money for it. With an initial goal of $2 million, the #BringBackMST3K campaign raised more than $6 million, ensuring funding for 14 brand-new episodes of the show that has been dormant since 1999. The MST3k campaign was so successful that it became the highest-grossing crowdfunded TV or film project in history, surpassing the previous Veronica Mars movie.
The new season will see the return of creator/star Hodgson along with Mary Jo Pehl, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy making cameos. It will debut the riffing talents of Joel McHale, Elliot Kalan and Dan Harmon as writers and Jonah Ray, Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt as host, new “Mad,” and the Evil Henchman, respectively.
Day was asked by Entertainment Weekly about which movies we can expect to make fun of with the new cast of MST3K, but she didn’t reveal anything, saying, “I can’t tell you, but I’m hoping Joel gets to announce a few of them. Rest assured, they’re bad.”
The move to Netflix as a distribution channel is obviously huge for the series, as it will put the new episodes of MST3k in front of a massive audience of subscribers. It’s unknown whether this will mean MST3k will be following the typical Netflix structure of releasing its entire season at once, but fans are certainly hoping that a successful season on Netflix would lead to the streaming giant funding a second season themselves, rather than have to conduct another historic crowdfunding campaign.
We caught up with Hodgson on the #BringBackMST3K project when the Kickstarter was first launched. Read the full interview here.