LeVar Burton's Reading Rainbow Kickstarter Closes With $5.4 Million, Now Coming to Xbox and PlayStation

Actor LeVar Burton's Kickstarter campaign to bring back beloved children's educational program Reading Rainbow ended last night with $5.4 million, which means the project will be available on video game consoles in addition to the web and smartdevices. That funding level makes the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter the fifth highest-grossing campaign on the crowdfunding site of all time, sitting behind the the Veronica Mars movie ($5.7 million), musician Neil Young's Pono ($6.2 million), the Ouya console ($8.6 million), and the Pebble Watch ($10.2 million).

Total funding for the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter campaign will actually be around $6.4 million when all is said and done, because Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane previously pledged to match every dollar contributed to the project above $4 million. The $5 million mark means the new Reading Rainbow project will be delivered on unspecified Xbox and PlayStation consoles, as well as mobile devices and over-the-top boxes like AppleTV, Roku, and Kindle Fire TV. More than 105,000 people backed the project.

Burton's overall ambition for his new Reading Rainbow initiative--originally planned as a web application-- is to bring the program to "every child, everywhere." The service will include an "unlimited library" of books and video field trips for "today's digitally connected kids." Reading Rainbow went off the air in 2009. It originally aired on PBS and Burton was its host and producer.