Hi ho, Snarker the Blogger here with an AfterEllen.com News Flash. I’m coming to you live from the internet today with important breaking news. The Muppets are making another movie. Yes, those muppets. Yes, another movie. Really. And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

That’s right, those adorable Muppets are coming back to the big screen, thanks to some unexpected champions. Disney, which now owns the rights to the Muppets, has greenlit a new feature film from actor-writer Jason Segel and his writing-directing partner Nick Stoller. In case those names don’t ring a bell, Segel and Stoller are the duo behind the upcoming R-rated comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Segel, whose credits include Knocked Up and Freaks and Geeks, can be seen every week on How I Met Your Mother.

I don’t know how I feel about this news yet. On the one hand, hip-hip-hooray for another Muppet movie. On the other, I’m a little wary. As with any sacred childhood memory, it’s a little frightening to see it reinvented as an adult. Thing can get ugly fast when people mess with the warmest, fuzziest touchstones of your formative years. Even today, I hear “Rainbow Connection” all these years later and I still get a little lump in my throat.

I remember watching The Muppet Show with my whole family. As soon as it was “time to play the music,” it was time to sit in front of the TV. And the movies were just as exciting. From the original to The Great Muppet Caper and The Muppets Take Manhattan, they were zany and fun and zany some more. I had the records (you know, those big vinyl things), and I somehow conned my parents into getting the commemorative Great Muppet Caper glasses from McDonalds (where we never ate). That Miss Piggy on a motorcycle glass was my favorite for years.

The world Jim Henson created was filled with plush misfits and felt oddballs. He helped make being different or funny or weird OK, possibly even cool. Kermit was my first journalistic role model (followed closely by Walter Cronkite). And Miss Piggy was a role model for how to be a strong, albeit porcine, woman. She certainly didn’t take any guff — hi-yah! Henson also had a hand, quite literally, in my most favorite shows and movies as a kid, from Sesame Street to Fraggle Rock and The Dark Crystal. I cried the day he died, it felt so like we’d all lost a friend.

Segel, whose first script was the upcoming Forgetting Sarah Marshall, pitched the idea for the film after taking a tour of Henson’s studio and realizing there were no Muppets lying around. When he learned that Disney had the rights to them, he called them up and said he’d like to write the new one. While the plot is under wraps, Segel said he wants to make the new movie like the originals:

"The old Muppet movies were written as though they were proper movies. They weren't novelty acts because there were puppets in it. It was like Kermit trying to put on a big Broadway musical in The Muppets Take Manhattan. Or The Great Muppet Caper? Come on! Charles Grodin is so good in it. I want to bring it back to that. Like those early '80s movies with a proper plot, and it's the Muppets putting on a show. It's not a hard formula.”

A hard formula? No. A beloved formula? Yes. So, let’s hope it turns into the most sensational, inspirational, celebrational, Muppetational Muppet movie of them all. Oh, and since there’s no such thing as too much nostalgia, this one is for scribegrrrl.