The Greatest Muppet Movie?

First point of business: if you haven’t yet seen Beaker’s attempt of Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind” while being subjected to YouTube comments, you should waste little time:

(As a sidenote, if you have Firefox and like looking around on YouTube, you should download YouTube Comment Snob. Filter out poor spelling, language, notes in all caps; it’ll make the place a little less taxing. If poor Beaker would have known, maybe he could have finished his song.)

Speaking of the Muppets, the much-rumored new Muppet movie is getting some more traction. Jason Segal, star of How I Met Your Mother, is apparently writing creating the screenplay for a film that is audaciously titled The Greatest Muppet Movie of All Time. The Film Stage has details:

The Greatest Muppet Movie of All Time is about Gary, Mary, and Walter (a man, his girlfriend, and the man’s life-long nondescript, brown puppet best friend) getting the old Muppet gang — now retired entertainers known for the same Muppet show we know them from — together to save the TV studio that the original show was shot in. A villain, Tex Richman (nice name, on par with Doc Hopper), bent on drilling for oil underneath the studio, is due to take over the studio in weeks and the only way to stop him? Putting on a show that draws ten million viewers.

There have been a few attempts to kick-start a resurgence of The Muppets since Jim Henson died. Much of their output in the past 20 years has been retelling stories with The Muppets as main characters (A Christmas Carol, Treasure Island, It’s a Wonderful Life, Wizard of Oz), with the occasional new story. This one sounds like it’s an attempt to revive the franchise by going back to the original idea of a variety show. The original Muppet Show is still oddly timeless, even if no kids are going to know who Raquel Welch or Leo Sayer are. And I don’t know how The Greatest Muppet Movie is going to top the first one, but I wish Segal the best.