The Good Times Movie w/ the Original Cast Failed Kickstarter

In the last several years numerous TV / film projects have made quite a splash on Kickstarter: Veronica Mars, MST3K, , and so why not a revival of a beloved 1970’s TV show like GOOD TIMES?

The basic idea for this campaign was to do a movie ‘reunion’ of the cast and characters from the classic TV series GOOD TIMES and find out what happened to them all in the 40 years since the show left the air.

To do this they were asking for a million dollars. I don’t think many wouldn’t call that goal ambitious.

I’m not sure why this Kickstarter failed but it failed ending up with only 200
backers pledging $8,758 of that $1,000,000 goal.

Here’s the pitch video:

I’ll admit it’s not the best pitch video I’ve seen on Kickstarter (or IndieGoGo either) but we’ve all seen a lot worse ones take a campaign to success and my first thought when watching it was “Wait a second, didn’t they kill on John Amos’s character on the show? How’s he coming back?”

What killed this Kickstarter? My first guess was lack of a social media campaign especially in the build up before the launch of the campaign. You can’t raise a million dollars in a vacuum.

Was it the million dollar goal? That could be it. Again, the pitch video didn’t say ”give me a million dollars to make something like this!” to me or to the people I asked about this campaign.

Was it the project? Yeah, I remember GOOD TIMES very well but let’s remember it’s a show that ran on CBS from 1974 to 1979 – what’s the median age of Kickstarter supporters?

The bottom line for this campaign is that it was (and there’s no kind way to say this) a colossal failure with only 200 supporters pledging a breakdown of funding like this:

Pledge $1 or more : 12 backers .
Pledge $5 or more : 31 backers
Pledge $10 or more : 25 backers
Pledge $25 or more : 71 backers
Pledge $40 or more : 6 backers
Pledge $50 or more : 27 backers
Pledge $75 or more : 6 backers
Pledge $100 or more : 9 backers
Pledge $150 or more : 3 backers
Pledge $250 or more : 1 backer
Pledge $1,000 or more : 1 backer
Pledge $1,500 or more : 1 backer

Total Pledged: $8,758 out of a goal of $1,000,000.00

Once again, it’s sometimes VERY hard to judge why a campaign will take off for a specific project and other times why it didn’t but I get the impression this one tried to do too much without the pre-launch work that needed to be done.