Original surviving cast of Good Times looks to Kickstarter for a reunion movie

Does a Good Times reunion sound DYN-O-MITE to you?

The surviving original cast members — John Amos (father James Evans, Sr.), Jimmie Walker (J.J.), Bern Nadette Stanis (Thelma), Ralph Carter (Michael) and Ja’Net Dubois (Willona Woods) — have joined in on a united Kickstarter effort to find a movie that would reunite them, some 40 years after their CBS sitcom aired.

Good Times was one of Norman Lear’s thought-provoking sitcom hits of the 1970s, a spin-off of Maude that debuted on CBS in February 1974 and aired 133 episodes over six seasons. Lear told TV critics last summer that a movie reboot from Sony and written by Kenya Barris (black-ish) was still in the works, but this is not that project.

This, as Walker says in the Kickstarter video, would be a “docu-dramedy-comedy. That’s what it’s going to be.”

“We had such a good time doing Good Times that we want to bring our family back to you,” Stanis says.

The Good Times Movie on Kickstarter had raised only $2,877 so far, with 16 days remaining in the all-or-nothing fund-raising campaign, with a goal of $1 million.

Shaun Weiss, an attorney for the cast project, told Deadline that they wouldn’t infringe upon Sony’s copyright ownership of Good Times, somehow, some way. “The whole premise of the movie is to show the Evans family in the future and what they’ve all become without bringing in the old. If there is a piece of the old show that would be used, we understand that we would have to get clearance, but that is not the case. We are not going to tread on the old Good Times. What we are doing is using the characters and doing something new and telling a very different story,” Weiss told Deadline.