Kickstarter Campaign To Revive ‘Reading Rainbow’ On Track To Hit $1M Goal Within Hours Of Launch: Video

Hours after its launch this morning, a Kickstarter campaign launched by LeVar Burton to bring back Reading Rainbow as a web series was 3/4 of the way to its goal of raising $1 million dollars. The campaign had set a deadline of Wednesday, July 2 to raise the cash, using incentives that range from offers of Reading Rainbow mugs and calendars, to passes to the Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas in July, to (for $10K) a private dinner with Burton at which you could wear the “one-and-only original visor” he wore when he played Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
On the Kickstarter page, Burton wrote the $1 million will get the web series launched and into 1,500 classrooms, “but once we get there, we’ve got some big ideas for stretch goals!” Reading Rainbow aired more than two decades on PBS.

“Of course, when Reading Rainbow began in 1983, we were using television to bring books to kids, meeting them where they wanted to be,” Burton wrote on the Kickstarter page. “In 2014, TV is not that place anymore. Now, we’re trying to reach a new generation of digital natives…That’s why, two years ago, I launched the Reading Rainbow App for tablets. Building on the basics of the television series, we put hundreds of quality books – and educational video field trips – right in a child’s hands. But…not all families have ... Read More »

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