Final Boss Form

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I took a quick glance and its good. He made fun of the guy who paid 10k for a bit part (a startup bro!) so I am happy about it.

My opinion in short: nobody wanted to take a Veronica Mars reboot or movie because they feared it was a money loser and that’s fine. It had a tough time while it was airing. WB made a deal, said “find $2 million and we’ll take care of the rest”, and so here we are. I have no problem with this. If I was running the WB I would probably just keep swimming in Batman money.

None of this means anything for kickstarter for regular folks and Amanda Palmer need to shut the fuck up. Veronica Mars is not an underdog, it had three seasons on a major network and the network gave up. The creator moved on and got another TV deal. There are thousands of people in the industry who would kill for five TV seasons, even cult hits.

Kickstarter can be a weird beast.

In any case, there’s no other way this movie happens. It sucks, but I’m resigned to it. I need to pay it forward towards someone who hasn’t had the same opportunity.

I totally agree that Veronica Mars is not an underdog. But that doesn’t mean that the publicity around the success of this project can’t move the needle. If the popular mythology around Veronica Mars is that brilliant but canceled shows can find life outside of the studio then perhaps there’s new hope for anything that isn’t on CBS. (And I’m going to ignore the Amanda Palmer bit because I like her and I didn’t bother reading whatever she said. It’s probably better that way.)

But again, we’re talking about a show that already had a lot of brand equity and goodwill going into today’s announcement. To that end, this bit in Maura Johnston’s similarly worded post is important although I disagree with the sentiment:

4. Focusing on “the positive” in this case means supporting the old methods of bringing culture to market and applying a DIY smokescreen, instead of thinking critically about and actually changing the method by which that happens. If that makes you happy, then, go on with your bad self, but I thought the internet would provide some paths that weren’t so dependent on old models in order to succeed.

I would like to see the Entertainment Industry change but it isn’t going to happen overnight and it isn’t going to happen Just Because The Internet. There is too much money and too much power entrenched in the old way of doing things. All of this Not Change you see happening is that power putting up a really well funded political, legal, and technical fight. Yes, Veronica Mars is a project for an already famous show, but its Kickstarter success still changes the conversation about how TV and film gets made.

But back to fatmanatee’s post: the success of the Marshmallows does nothing for unknown, unconnected creators on Kickstarter unless Kickstarter can get the backers of its high profile projects to discover some of the lesser known but equally intriguing small projects. That sort of thing has to be planned and programmed. It doesn’t just happen through the implementation of a Discover page with a few carousels of local and staff pick recommendations. This happens through building a backer community that celebrates their continued involvement while fostering a culture of discovery.

The good news is that if anybody has a head start on figuring this sort of thing out, it’s Kickstarter.