One little private-eye show cancelled six years ago is certainly causing some hullabaloo.
Within a mere 11 hours on March 13, a Kickstarter campaign raised the $2 million needed to launch a "Veronica Mars" movie adaptation, financed primarily by the fans and distributed by Warner Bros. Only a few hours after, other fans of cult TV shows materialized to crusade once more.
Fans of the cancelled-before-their-time shows "Pushing Daisies," "Chuck" and, of course, the infamous "Firefly" are clambering for Kickstarters. Even high-profile personalities such as Zachary Levi of "Chuck" or "Pushing Daisies" creator Bryan Fuller are on board.
"Veronica Mars" creator Rob Thomas told HitFix the approach could be a game-changer: "If it works, it works, and (Warner Bros) could start doing more of these."
It's a coup for artists and fans everywhere. They've wrestled creative control from studios. The power of Internet collaboration conquers all the things — or not.
Blogger S.T. VanAirsdale outlined the potential financial concerns involved with Kickstarter. Some viewers will end up paying twice, once for funding and again for tickets.
Collider's Matt Goldberg concluded, "The big winner is a studio that gauged interest by making fans pay, and will now run away with their money."
Vulture's Josh Wolk highlighted the nostalgia as a core motivation, while Matt Zoller Seitz's piece, "Why Fans Should Stop Trying to Bring Back Dead Shows," from last fall, is also making the rounds.
No one's claiming this Kickstarter campaign isn't important. It's being touted as an example of the power of fandom, and that alone is obviously worth something. The reality, however, is less romantic.
The project has prompted comparisons to the forthcoming reboot of "Arrested Development" hitting Netflix this spring, the "Star Wars" prequels and sequels and the failure of "Indiana Jones" — all indications of nostalgia obsession, instant gratification and fanatic fixations. Wolk believes this "fervent campaigning for more, more, more is really a rally for time to move backward," but it's more than revisiting treasured pasts structured around pop cultural moments.
It's more than using shows and movies to remind us of who we were, but revisiting those stories to reinforce who we are.
This is part nostalgia, part reaffirmation of ourselves. We're aware we can't go backward. We just want something that helped originally inform our identities to reinforce what we've become. Cult properties are our pop culture parents and we're middle-aged children unwilling to move out of the basement. It's about validation of the perceived power of the digital age, of exclusivity and nerd devotion. It's about a convergence of all our cultural hang-ups, supposed progress cushioned with a safety net of something established. No matter how integral they were to our evolution, there comes a time to move out of our parents' basements.
We can't claim we're getting our own place when we've never really gone through the effort to pack. "Veronica Mars" and its other cult pals itching for the same shot are empty boasts of originality, retreadings of rightfully beloved but dead properties, safely insulated by fandom, with built-in audiences now potentially easing investment risks.
There's a reason for the "cult" label. Cults promote insulation, a hive mind, hardly a flattering comparison for fans priding themselves on championing creative, misunderstood underdogs. If you want to support the originality that drew you to a cult property in the first place, find something original.
Reach the columnist at esther.drown@asu.edu or follow her at @EMDrown
