Well I know what’s going on my Christmas list this year. One of the beloved Sandlot kids is on board for a reunion, and is willing to personally start the Kickstarter Campaign.
In a recent interview with MTV, actor Patrick Renna (our S'mores-pounding buddy Ham from The Sandlot) says he’d be willing to help launch the kickstarter:
I’ll meet grandparents with their kids and their kids that all watch it, [so] that would be the one to do on Kickstarter and would probably have a lot of success. Because what we found in doing it is when you have a real fan base or what you’re doing — like Veronica Mars — I think that’s one that’s the most successful. I think a Sandlot one would do pretty darn good, but I don’t know. You want to run it, I’ll do it, how about that?
You’re killin' me, Smalls! This seems like a recipe for success to me; considering the cult following that The Sandlot has, I can imagine there would be a plethora of fans who would be willing to contribute to a Kickstarter in hopes of seeing their favorite Sandlot kids.
Renna has a significant amount of experience utilizing Kickstarter to raise money for a film project. He recently ran a campaign to fund his upcoming film Bad Roomies which will be released this December on demand. Serving as both a producer and star of Bad Roomies, Renna called upon fans of his childhood work on The Sandlot to help accrue the funds necessary to film the new movie.
Originally released in 1993, The Sandlot revolves around a group of kids who spend their summer playing baseball on the, you guessed it, sandlot. When a new kid, Smalls, accidentally loses a Babe Ruth signed ball in their game, the gang must band together to rescue the ball from the terrifying dog (The Beast) that lives next door to the lot.
While the group of kids were, and still are, relative unknowns, the movie succeeded in capturing the hearts of its viewers, and illustrating exactly what it was like to be a kid. The Sandlot has gained a strong cult following, and become a pop culture icon of the 90’s with enough quotable lines, many of which spoken by Renna himself, to cement the The Sandlot in film history forever.
The film does contain a few household names: notably Marley Shelton as the always lotioning Wendy Pfefferkorn and Darth Vader himself, James Earl Jones, as the next door neighbor and owner of The Beast.
So does a Sandlot reunion have any legs to it? I’d say yes. We’ve seen how a population of devoted fans can easily fund a movie through a well-run Kickstarter. Considering that The Sandlot has generations of devoted fans and families who share their adoration for the original, if they manage to wrangle up some swag as incentive I can’t see why a Kickstarter wouldn’t work. And if it doesn’t, well, we’d just have to tell Renna "You Raise Money Like a Girl!"
