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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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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The sequel to 2011′s The Muppets, called Muppets…Again! (aka The Muppets 2) has begun production in London.  It will be in theaters on March 21, 2014.  The Muppets was one of my favorite movies of 2011, so I’m very excited for this one, even though I’m not a very big fan of the human cast members this time around.

It finds the Muppet repertory company enjoying a triumphant world tour, only to become tangled up with a criminal mastermind named Constantine, who is out to steal an enormous diamond—and who happens to be a dead ringer for Kermit.

“I always loved those classic jewel-heist capers from the ’60s and ’70s, so I was very keen to do a movie that had elements of that [genre] featuring the Muppets and comedy and songs,” says returning director James Bobin, who co-wrote the script with Nicholas Stoller.