On Monday we brought you the news that NBC would be producing a series of animated shorts to mark the return of Community from its mid-season hiatus.

The first of the shorts has premiered online today. You can watch “Abed’s Master Key Part 1” here below.

Featuring the voices of the Community cast, “Master Key” finds Abed (Danny Pudi) becoming Dean Pelton’s (Jim Rash) “depu-dean” and being given a master key to all of Greendale Community College, something the rest of the gang will likely attempt to exploit in the next two shorts.

After several months on hiatus, NBC’s Community will be coming back to its Thursday night time slot next month.

Back in November, the comedy was unceremoniously yanked from the network’s mid-season line-up with no word if it would even return, leaving fans in a panic. In January, NBC finally broke their silence when they announced that the show would be back… eventually.

Today, showrunner Dan Harmon sent a joyful message out from his Twitter account confirming that Community would be back on Thursday nights at 8 starting March 15, 2012.

Community is coming back, folks. It will happen some day soon. In the meantime you can make the time leading up to the show’s return go much faster by playing this cool Community board game concocted by the people at US Direct, a subsidiary of Direct TV.

You can check out the game board below and you can download and print a much larger version of the board—which comes with cut-out game pieces depicting the seven members of Greendale’s most diverse (and screwed up) study group—at the US Direct source link below.

Ever since the news hit back in November (which we reported on here) that NBC’s Thursday night comedy series Community would not be returning to the network’s mid-season line-up, the development has sent major shock waves throughout the online community, including many devoted (and now seriously pissed off) fans of the show.

The network’s decision to pull Community until an indeterminate date created a groundswell of support for the show, leading some of the higher-ups at the Peacock to wonder if they had made a tragic mistake, and I mean a tragic mistake that makes 2009’s Jay Leno Show fiasco look like a minor inconvenience. In a recent interview, the ratings-starved network’s Entertainment President Robert Greenblatt said the show will return.

That time is almost upon us, my new favorite part of the Christmas season: the annual holiday (that’s right Fox News, I said “holiday” – blow me) episode of my favorite television comedy series Community. You can check out a preview of the episode here below.

Last year the show delivered a classic send-up of the Rankin-Bass stop-motion animated holiday specials of the 1960s while delving into the complex personality of the show’s sweetly enigmatic pop culture obsessive Abed (Danny Pudi). This year finds Greendale Community College’s most diverse (in more ways than one) study group getting involved in the school’s annual Christmas pageant when the Greendale Glee Club gets sidelined.