The Kickstarter campaign was a huge success, and you’ve continued to raise money from add-on sales and merchandise. Were you surprised at the response?

"I could have screwed up the brand really bad if this had failed!"

It sounds weird when I talk about it, but obviously the goal was to make 12 episodes — but I believed we’d do it. The reason why is because we did all those Cinematic Titanic [movie riffing] shows. We did 100 live shows, performed for 100,000 people in the course of five years. I probably met 30,000 of those people. I just did the math, and went, well, if people are willing to come see Cinematic Titanic — which isn’t Mystery Science Theater — and pay $50 a ticket, get a babysitter, go out to eat; they’re spending about $100. If those people that were willing to come in and go see a show would put in the money to bring back MST [we could do it]. It was just a back-of-the-envelope, very naïve calculation.

It’s one of those things you don’t really think about until you get to the other side. Like, "Wait a minute, I could have screwed up the brand really bad if this had failed!" If I tried it, and we got half the money, if would have looked tainted. It wouldn’t have been seen as a success. I didn’t realize that until we were on the other side. It worked out fortunately.

The original MST3K owed its success to the characters themselves as much as the jokes. Did you expect to find so many big names interested in being part of the revival?

That’s been a very gradual thing. Meeting people over the years that are doing really cool things that really like Mystery Science Theater. I knew who was going to be the usual ensemble. I cast Jonah [Ray in the lead role], and then I said you should pick the guys who are going to be Tom Servo and Crow, because you have to go into this feeling like you can win, and feeling like you’re going to be comfortable, and that you have people that you really like. He really picked out [comedians Hampton Yount and Baron Vaughn, the new robot sidekicks].

They were in place, but about three months out, I didn’t have a mad scientist. I knew her name. I knew the story, that she would be Dr. Forrester’s daughter. I didn’t know who it was, and then I met Felicia at Salt Lake City Comic Con. We became friends, and she told me how much she liked the show. I started thinking about it, going, "Wow, she’s really perfect for Dr. Forrester’s daughter." That was kind of the last piece that fell in to make it happen.

It had to be a little daunting, because people do get proprietary about who plays these roles. Were people concerned about the revival given that you were recasting some of the show’s best-known characters?

I saw it. I was going, "I’m really proud of the concept." I think that’s worthy. Everybody kind of ignored that this had never been done before. It was a complete new way of doing a comedy show. Over time, I think it became easier for people to see that the concept was worth maintaining and refreshing with new people. That was the biggest hurdle, because there were a lot of people saying, "Impossible, you can’t make it without the people that [originally] did it." But even within the history of the show, the entire cast had been refreshed. To me, it was obvious, but to a lot of people is was like, "It’s either got to be you or Mike. Don’t you get that? It’s you or Mike."

You said the concept still works. Why do you think it still plays, so many years later?

"I think it carries its culture with it."

There’s a lot of reasons, looking back, why I think it might work. I think one of the ideas is that it’s not topical. It’s really based on the culture of the movie you’re in. The movie is the reality that you’re riffing on, whereas if you were doing a show that’s topical, the world is the globe that you’re in. With MST, the movie is the sphere that you’re in. I think that it carries its culture with it.

I’d argue the aesthetic is also important. The fact that it feels handcrafted and homegrown; the puppets give it a timelessness.

That was one of the things I wasn’t going to talk about, but it’s a document of a day or two. It’s really live-looking. It looks like a Saturday Night Live sketch, because we do everything in-camera. There’s no post or digital effects, and I think people accept that as, "Oh this is a document of a day or two in the life of these people who are making a show." There were a lot of top people in our production that wanted a film look for the new show, and wanted it to look like it was not videotape. We had a few fights about that.

Comedy really works great if it’s a nice crisp medium that feels more live. Comedy has a harder time on film. Up until Ghostbusters, there really was no big-budget comedy film. It’s still a bit of an anomaly as far as entertainment goes.