I once met LeVar at a bar at a restaurant. As a fan of Star Trek, I wanted to go up to him, but figured he must get bothered by a lot of intense trekkies so I broke the ice with a conversation about Reading Rainbow.
He talked about Reading Rainbow with me for a good 15 minutes straight. He was unbelievably proud and passionate about the work he did on that show, and so I'm very pleased to see this video today.
LeVar is a class act. Read the rewards on that Kickstarter page. The rewards are filled with LeVar's time. He obviously really believes in this; otherwise I don't think someone of his fame would be willing to record 150 personalized class greetings, 150 personalized incoming voicemail messages, 25 ten minute video chats, etc, all the way up to flying out to a school of your choice to do an assembly.
This will meet its goal today which is good because I've had the theme song of the show in my head since reading this article.
"This will meet its goal today which is good because I've had the theme song of the show in my head since reading this article."
I haven't been keeping close track of the exact times but I think it's $150,000 in the last hour or so (about $12K just in the time I took to write this!), and the word has probably only just begun to spread (HN is reasonably leading edge for this stuff). I think this is a serious candidate for biggest Kickstarter ever... this is exactly the sort of thing where Kickstarter allows you to convert your highly-diffuse "good reputation" into cash for a cause, and whereas some of the previous people who did that were still pretty niche video game creators who still raked in single-digit millions, well... how many people know Reading Rainbow as compared to "The guy who did Wasteland"? (No offense intended, Brian Fargo, sir. I bet you'd know what I mean.) This could easily go double-digit millions, IMHO. Especially if this hits as a human interest story on national news, which were I them I'd be looking to shoot for.
They better get those stretch goals they say they have ready for posting...
Edit: Kept track for ten minutes, from $286,533 to $330,317. That comes out to ~$4,000 per minute. At that rate it's 3 hours to one million, and I'd bet on acceleration rather than deceleration....
Further edit: Larger baseline of 48 minutes, about $2.5K/minute. Funding is four hours away at that rate, but I still bet there's another wave of people who haven't heard.
I checked the page about an hour ago, and it was at about $180k, I just went back now to watch the video and it's now $250k and actively rising as I watch the video! I'm going to say this will definitely destroy its goals. :)
Yes, he played Geordi La Forge on ST:TNG. It's been decades but as I recall, there was even a crossover episode of RR where they went behind the scenes and showed him in costume, how the transporter effect was done and so forth. I still remember it vividly.
He talked about Reading Rainbow with me for a good 15 minutes straight. He was unbelievably proud and passionate about the work he did on that show, and so I'm very pleased to see this video today.
Proof https://twitter.com/dmitric/status/405038964001996800