Tomorrow will mark the one year anniversary of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice, premiering on YouTube. The series ended just over a week ago after 100 episodes, and now the production company Pemberley Digital is in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to release the series on DVD. Get the details after the break.
If this article’s title didn’t clue you in, the The Lizzie Bennet Diaries DVD…and More! Kickstarter has done amazingly well. It reached it’s $60,000 goal within 6 hours of going live on March 22nd, and it is now sitting just shy of $370,000 pledged and 5,500 backers with 2 weeks to go. Like most Kickstarter campaigns, there are plenty of good rewards at various pledge levels, including signed copies of the DVD, voicemails from the cast, and even a guest spot in the upcoming web series Welcome to Sanditon (which is sadly already taken). Most of the backers have donated $55 or more, as that is lowest amount you can pledge and get a copy of the DVD.
We covered the web series when it first debuted last year, and it’s nice to see it gain an audience. While popular YouTuber Hank Green is an Executive Producer on the series, he hasn’t whored out the show on his own channels, making the 31 million views and almost 200,000 subscribers that more impressive.