Just before 10 p.m. on a recent Friday night in Austin, hundreds of people crowded around picnic tables in the beer garden of the Dog and Duck Pub, staring and screaming at an iPad held up by a slightly tipsy man in semi-rimless glasses and a green plaid shirt.

The man was Rob Thomas, creator of the “teen noir” television show Veronica Mars , which last aired in 2007, and he was counting down the final seconds of a Kickstarter campaign to bring back Veronica as a movie.

When the “ Veronica Mars Movie Project” launched on March 13, Thomas needed to raise at least $2 million in thirty days. It hit that figure in less than twelve hours, breaking several of the crowdfunding site’s records—fastest to $1 million, fastest to $2 million, fastest to its minimum goal. By the campaign's end, it also smashed the mark for most supporters, with 91,585 people giving a total of $5,702,153—a dollar amount that was itself the third-highest in Kickstarter history. That prompted the giddy people at the Dog and Duck to start a cheer—“We’re number three! We’re number three!”—that Thomas happily joined in on.

Rob Thomas counts down the end of the Veronica Mars Kickstarter from Texas Monthly on Vimeo.

“I’m so overwhelmed and overjoyed by the reaction to this. It has been, first, the most exhausting month of my life, and the best month,” Thomas, who also wrote the film’s script during that thirty-day period, told the crowd. “Not to discount the birth of our children, honey,” he added, gesturing in the general direction of his wife, Katie.

A former Austin and San Marcos musician who is sometimes confused with Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 (especially on Twitter), Thomas was also a TCU football player (he eventually gave up the pads and tranferred to UT), high school teacher and young adult novelist before becoming a TV writer. After spending many years in California, he moved back to Austin, in part because he didn't want his children to grow up in Hollywood (he once lived right next door to Britney Spears).

Originally, he’d only planned to gather friends and family at the Dog and Duck, mostly to provide a little action for the documentary video crew shooting “making-of” footage for the movie’s inevitable DVD. “All we have is you staring at a computer,” the director had complained.  

So Thomas approached his old friend Hunter Darby, who manages the Dog and Duck and also plays in several Austin bands (the Wannabes, the Service Industry, the Diamond Smugglers) whose music had been featured on Veronica. Even after mentioning the night on the Kickstarter site, Thomas didn’t think there’d be more than forty or fifty people, and asked Darby to reserve only three picnic tables.

Then, more than 500 supporters said they’d come, prompting the pub to put out port-a-potties, hire an off-duty sheriff’s deputy and stock two outdoor tailgate tents with beer. Those were dubbed “Veronica Bars,” which also became the evening’s Twitter hashtag .

Summarized by Joy Press of the Village Voice as “a fusion of  Chinatown and Heathers,” Veronica Mars starred Kristen Bell as the title character, the teenage daughter of a working-class private eye in wealthy, corrupt Neptune, California, who, like her father, also sleuthed. It was a direct descendant of both Nancy Drew and Buffy the Vampire Slayer ( Buffy creator Joss Whedon even had a cameo on the show), only darker—the pilot episode flashes back to Veronica being roofied and raped. Television may still be in what the critic Alan Sepinwall calls a “new golden age,” with shows like Breaking Bad and Mad Men , but female leads remain in short supply.

Even so, until last month Veronica Mars was just another canceled cult show, one its fans still pined for but the average TV viewer never watched, similar to Whedon’s Firefly or Mitchell Hurwitz’s Arrested Development . Now, all three of those shows have made comebacks, a direct result of the TV-on-DVD and online-streaming era, in which nothing ever really goes away. Firefly spawned a 2005 movie, Serenity, while Netflix has produced a fourth season of Arrested Development that will become available May.

But Veronica Mars is the first fan-financed, crowdsourced movie adaptation of a shuttered show, an apotheosis of the Internet and social media era. Thomas personally greeted every person at the Dog and Duck who stood in line to meet him. It was kind of like the wedding scene in Good Fellas , except the envelopes of cash were all delivered quietly and virtually by Amazon, which processes Kickstarter’s payments.

“I’m enjoying it too much, which I know is slowing down the line,” Thomas apologized.

But the fans weren’t only there to see Thomas, nor did they expect Bell, who had a baby on March 28, to be in Austin (though male lead Jason Dohring made a Bieberesque surprise appearance).

“Oh no,” said Stacey Aversing, a 34-year-old military contractor procurement employee who travelled seven hours from Louisiana. “I love Rob. But the fans are what made this project happen. The fans are people that love the same thing I do.”

Aversing’s kindred spirits included Dawn Radcliff, 37, a stay-at-home mom who missed a family camping trip—at her husband’s insistence—to be there; Sarah Rutledge, 42, an Apple employee who got visible goosebumps telling me about her favorite creepy scene involving Dohring’s character; and Angela Nardecchia, a 38-year-old PhD student in counseling psychology at Texas Women’s University, who is particularly drawn to the show’s portrayal of “socioeconomic status, the power differential, gender, and ethnicity.”

There were also five women from Portland, Oregon, having a bachelorette party—Emily Cable, 29, gave the Kickstarter $50 and had each of her four friends, including bride-to-be Molly Cooney-Mesker, get started on the series DVDs and pledge $1 each so they could go.

“It’s been a Veronica Mars marathon,” said Cooney-Mesker.

“We figured we’d be yelling at each other in a loud bar anyway, so it might as