Kickstarter Countdown

Whoa! You guys are awesome! The Kickstarter has surpassed the stretch goal of $50,000 and is sitting north of $52K as of this morning with a day and a half to go.

Many thanks to one donor who generously took the super-duper $5K option with the awesome Jerry Goldsmith posters!

The campaign is still open and runs until 11:59PM Pacific time Thursday night, 7/10/25. Please keep contributing, this money is valuable—and here’s the plan to spend it:

Our web company is working now on the new FSM site—they started back in April, as I was optimistic our campaign would be successful—and have tentatively planned on October 1st as a completion date for the new message board, FSM archive, FSM Online, and all that the site entails.

The new board will most likely be wpForo, which you can read about here.

There’s presently a thread on on our (old and crappy) board where users are suggesting extra stuff they would like. Please chime in! Once the new site is launched, the purpose of the Kickstarter stretch goal is to have a reserve fund so I can make a list of extras and then get the web company building those probably in October–December.

Somebody said they’d like an archive to put alternate cover art. Sounds good to me! That’s a perfect example of something we can add to the site. Keep the ideas coming, we read them—and better yet, we’ll do them!

The Ray Ellis Filmation CD is complete as far as the master and liner notes, and is now in layout with Joe Sikoryak. We should be able to ship the CD, trading cards and mugs to donors in September. (We’ll also make them available to everybody via FSMCDs.com at that time.)

The Best of FSM 35th Anniversary book will take a bit longer as I honestly haven’t even begun working on it. I have a general idea of some key articles I want to include, but I also want to commission new pieces (and write some myself) and I need to reach out to our writers to see who is available and interested. But I need to see what our budget is, which will be based on the final Kickstarter amount.

Somebody asked in the comments to yesterday’s column if I’ll be using Kickstarter money to improve FSMCDs.com. The answer is that yes, I will be investing in improvements to FSMCDs.com (the site has never really worked right)—but will be using the proceeds from the store, and not the Kickstarter, to do so.

I’ve been doing this since 1990 and I have learned about managing money and having realistic expectations. I’ve also learned a thing or two about luck, given the abundance of good luck I have had in my life.

It’s something that you can’t really control, but you can influence in ways that are not surprising: being sincere, working hard, having good intentions and having your heart in the right place—but also being practical and prudent.

What I’ve learned is that the passion for film music may not be widespread in our world (though it is getting a little bit bigger) but it runs very deep. It can connect us across oceans, across generations, and lead to a very loyal audience—and also loyal contributors.

I am proud to be working with the same collaborators, writers and record label friends that I had 10, 20 and 30 years ago. So many of them have helped promote the Kickstarter and I’m truly grateful.

We’ve also gotten incredibly lucky to find a web development company that is just starting out, with very hardworking and talented personnel, and has been willing to build the new FSM site at wages that are fair, but way less than you’d get from a typical firm.

And above all...thanks to all of you folks. You are the best and I’m so excited to build our new web community.

So here’s to a strong close to the campaign and thank you so much!