As readers of this blog may already know, I’m a pretty big fan of The Muppets.  I thought the last film, 2011′s The Muppets was a return to form, and the first that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed since 1999′s Muppets from Space.  With the sequel The Muppets…Again! in production now, they’ve been making more appearances.  It’s a great way to keep them near front of mind when the trailers for the new movie start to appear.

On April 28, 2013, at 7:30 PM ET/PT, The Muppets are going to make one of those appearances: stopping by the Duncan family’s home on Disney Channel’s Good Luck Charlie.

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Disneynature is a company that was launched in April 2008 to bring back one of the staples of Walt Disney’s career: True-Life Adventures.  I’m a pretty big fan of the company, and their work, so it was with great interest that I’ve sought out more information about their projects on a regular basis.

I’ve seen most of their films, when they’ve had topics that have interested me, and so far I’ve only skipped one.  Starting with Earth, which was kind of a summary version of the BBC’s Planet Earth, I’ve been captivated by this series of films.  Oceans was a disappointment to me, spending too much time on climate change and not enough time on the strange and wonderful creatures that inhabit the deep.  The narration was lacking as well, with too little talking when we needed some more explanation of what we were seeing.

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Since the announcement that Disney bought Lucasfilm, there has been a wide range of reactions to it, from the very optimistic and positive, to the stunningly negative and outrageous.  There are many reasons to be optimistic though, and I feel there are no valid arguments against Disney at this point.  Within the few years, Disney has made some pretty smart moves with their acquisitions.  Let’s take a look at that to see why Star Wars is safe in the House of Mouse.

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If you’ve not seen Revenge of the Sith by now, this article will be spoiler filled, so avoid if you need to.  However, if you’ve read my other articles, you already know all of the stuff here anyway, so read on.

There is one pretty big inconsistency in the Star Wars films that I don’t know the answer to.

How does Leia remember her mother?

It seems there are many theories about why, in Return of the Jedi, Leia says that her mother was “very beautiful. Kind, but…sad.”

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Ed is another one of those shows that is being held up because of the music that they used in the show.  Over the years there have been some rumors about work being done on the DVD, but lately those rumors have become increasingly pessimistic toward any sort of release at all.

While everyone seems to want The Wonder Years, that is at least available on Netflix streaming.  The same, unfortunately, cannot be said of Ed, which is one of the best TV shows ever made.  It deserves a release onto home video.

Produced by Worldwide Pants, this show features Tom Cavanagh as Ed Stevens, a contracts lawyer at a high-profile New York City firm. Around the same time he splits with his wife (she slept with a mailman), he makes a single error in punctuation when going over a contract; and because of the resulting financial loss to the firm, he’s fired. Despondent, he heads back to his (small) hometown of Stuckeyville — ‘Anytown’, USA. There he realizes he’s been missed by a lot of friends whom he’s missed; and he sees Carol (Julie Bowen), the girl he’d adored in high school. Swept up in roiling emotions, Ed buys the local bowling alley on a whim, moves to Stuckeyville, and determines to win Carol’s heart. His horizons broaden as he settles once more in Stuckeyville, and the series itself settles into a charming, funny, often serious slice-of-life series focused not solely on Ed but on the lovable ensemble cast of people who live and work with him in Stuckeyville.

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When you look back on the Star Wars prequels, there is one thing that doesn’t stand out as very obvious at first.  There weren’t many introduced mysteries that we absolutely had to get the answers to.  Instead, most of the mysteries were laid bare for us to see as if we were the ones writing the screenplays.  This wasn’t true all the time, of course, but in those cases, the mysteries weren’t character driven enough, or sweeping enough to cover the trilogy.

Mystery Boxes are those mysteries that occur when you’re watching a movie or TV series brings up a bunch of questions that you feel the need to know the answers to.  They happen very frequently at the beginning of the original Star Wars film, A New Hope.

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One of the big questions about the new Star Wars trilogy is this: what does this mean for all of the books in the Expanded Universe that take place after the original trilogy?

First, some background on the Expanded Universe

Since 1991′s release of Heir to the Empire, new Star Wars stories have been released pretty consistently.  Books that cover, so far, about 44 years of adventures after the Battle of Yavin (which is the battle that takes place in A New Hope).  This territory includes many adventures with the primary cast from the trilogy, as well as their children, the Empire, and changes to the known universe.  A lot of great adventures that land all over the timeline.  If a character dies in a particular book, any book that happens later on cannot have that character suddenly living as if nothing has happened.  What people that don’t know, or understand, that haven’t looked into the Expanded Universe, is that it all happens on the same timeline. This means that a book that happens on the timeline between two previously written books can’t change things so much that the following story doesn’t make sense, so that there’s a logical progression.

Now, with new Star Wars sequels coming to film, how does that effect the Expanded Universe?

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Today, there was official confirmation from the head of Disney Bob Iger, that there will be spin-off films in the Star Wars cinematic universe.  What does this mean?  Well, what we previously thought may not be true (that remains to be seen, with this news).  We thought that Lawrence Kasdan and Simon Kinberg were going to be the screenwriters on Episodes VIII and IX, and that might still be true, as no writers have been announced at this time for those films.  They will be consulting on those films, as they are on Episode VII currently.  However, they will be pretty busy developing their own screenplays following individual characters in the Star Wars universe.

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