Veronica Mars

What makes a TV show successful? What allows it to be renewed season after season? The obvious answer is the number of viewers per week, but today it has become much more than that. Television shows only last for multiple seasons now if they have dedicated fan bases, even better are those with nicknames. You have the Gleeks, the Gossip Girls, and the Trekkie’s, but none other compare to The Marshmallow’s. This is the beyond dedicated fan base of the television show Veronica Mars starring Kristin Bell, Jason Dohring, and Percy Daggs III. This show was on air from 2004-2007 and it followed the life of Veronica Mars (Kristin Bell) who was a teenage private investigator whose passion for finding justice was ignited when her best friend was murder when they were fifteen. Her father was fired from his town Sheriff position during the process of finding the killer and she becomes a poor pariah in a town that puts the rich on a pedestal and the poor in jail. Veronica spends three years being on and off with her bad boy boyfriend Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) and solves many cases with the help of her best friend Wallace Fennel (Percy Daggs III).
This was a cult hit and became very popular with their loyal fans that called themselves marshmallows, based on a Veronica quote. In 2007 it was surprisingly cancelled and it shocked the fans, but mostly the actors. Not many of their careers had taken off yet, so this was crushing. Ever since then the actors had always wanted to make a movie to close out some of the holes for the fans and really bring an end to something so dear to their hearts. In early 2013 Kristen Bell, Jason Dohring, and the shows creator Rob Thomas got together and created a video to which they posted on Kickstarter asking fans to sponsor a Veronica Mars movie project. Just hours after the video was posted and the backing was available the project had hundreds of thousands of dollars and they realized this might actually work! The show offered prizes and benefits for people who donated money and the more money you donated the bigger the prize. They were giving away premiere tickets, signed movie posters, and even the opportunity to be an extra in the movie! By the end of the time limit the fans had donated over 6.5 million dollars to create a movie they wanted to see. This was the largest backed kick starter in the history of kick starters! That is a dedicated group of Marshmallow’s!
The movie came out on March 14, 2014 in select theatres and available for download and the fans were dying for some answers and closure seven years later. The movie opens with movie reels filled with clips from the show with Veronica narrating her life story through the videos to give background for the non-marshmallows. This was a great way to open the movie because it allowed those who got dragged to see without previously knowing anything were fully informed and ready to enjoy the movie. We then hear Jamie Lee Curtis, which is a great celeb cameo for a movie of this size, asking Veronica Mars to profile herself to explain to this law firm why anyone would have a been given a Private Investigator’s license for their eighteenth birthday and what that says about a person. Well, it doesn’t scream normality that’s for sure. We hear on the TV a few minutes later that bad boy Logan Echolls is being charged for murder and seconds later Veronica gets a phone call from none other than the suspect himself. She flies back to Neptune, California to help Logan, visit her dad, and try not to get sucked back into the detective life. The movie was so fulfilling because it was like a long series finale where holes in the story line are filled, relationships escalate, and blood is shed. The movie was created because the fans wanted it and Rob Thomas did an amazing job of listening to the fans and giving them exactly what they wanted.
When this show first began in 2004 none of the actors were famous and this was just a fun gig they hope would work out for a season maybe two, so that is to preface that the acting is never amazing. They were all very young in the early productions of the show definitely matured into adults and better actors. This is what put Kristin Bell on the map and allowed her to really thrive in the role of the witty and intelligent Veronica. She became a superstar with many headliner movies, while most of the other actors almost disappeared after the show was cancelled. The creation of this movie allowed them to start their careers up again and show that they have changed as actors. The acting was obviously not Oscar worthy but it was exactly what any fan of the show would have wanted, all the actors slipped right back into their characters as if they had never left.

The movie was created for one sole purpose, to please the fans that backed the movie, and it achieved its purpose. It was a low budget movie that originally had a small following and that is hard to produce a box office blowout with the limited resources it had. So with what they had I believe the movie was very well done. If they had a little bit more money and longer time to shoot and really think delve into certain scenes I think it would have been amazing for everyone and not just fans of the show. That said, if you have ever watched Veronica Mars, go see this movie and revel in the adulthood they all step into and it will meet all your wildest dreams.