"Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane has promised a pot of gold for LeVar Burton's "Reading Rainbow," announcing Thursday that he will match pledges on Kickstarter dollar-for-dollar up to $1 million over the next five days.
The award-winning "Reading Rainbow" children's series, which encouraged children to read, ran on PBS from 1983 to 2009 and hosted by actor LeVar Burton. The program introduced hundreds of new books to children.
Burton, best known for his roles as Kunta Kinte from "Roots" and Geordi La Forge in "Star Trek: The Next Generation," launched a tablet version of the program in 2012. He announced last month he was starting a Kickstarter campaign to revive "Reading Rainbow."
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A "Reading Rainbow" app includes more than 500 books and video field trips with Burton, who encouraged children to "take a look, it's in a book." The funds raised will go to create an educator-specific format for schools and made available free to 1,500 of the neediest classrooms with the first $1 million donated, according to RRKidz, the for-profit company co-founded by Burton,
according to The Associated Press.
So far, the "Reading Rainbow" site has raised $4.09 million with more than 85,000 contributing to the project. Burton called MacFarlane's offer "stupendous" and "this is really huge" in
a video on the Kickstarter website.
Burton said on his "Reading Rainbow" Kickstarter site that he the $5 million will bring Reading Rainbow to more media platforms and 7,500 classrooms.
"This all means one thing: there has never been a better time to bring new people into this campaign," Burton said in a statement on Kickstarter. "Every new dollar you add to your pledge, or spend on an add-on reward, or convince your friends and relatives to add, will get us two dollars to help schools. This is unbelievable, y'all. It's like we've always said: we can go anywhere, and if we pull together, we will."
MacFarlane, the animator, actor and voice-over artist who created primetime animated television shows like "Family Guy," "American Dad" and "The Cleveland Show," also wrote and stars in the current summer movie "A Million Ways to Die in the West."
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