It’s no secret that Pixar Animation is the best thing going for The Walt Disney Company these days. The studio behind Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and Wall-E has yet to make a bad movie in their sixteen-year run, making it very obvious that these people know more about great filmmaking than most others combined.

Unsurprisingly, Disney has begun to utilize this asset of theirs when it comes to delivering good non-Pixar films. It began with Tron: Legacy when Pixar was brought in to help with some re-shoots, and now Disney is bringing them back in to help with another upcoming project: The Greatest Muppet Movie Ever Made.

We’ve been hearing a lot about this new Muppet movie that’s on the way, and it started with word that Forgetting Sarah Marshall star and director Jason Segel and Nick Stoller were writing the script.

There’s been a lot of back-and-forth on the Walt Disney Company project since then, including the hiring of Flight of the Conchords creator and writer James Bobin to direct the film. Now comes word of the first major non-Muppet casting for the movie, and it will be none other than Segel himself.

Segel is the perfect casting for the human lead of a Muppet movie — which we’ve heard would be called The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made, but it’s unclear whether this is still the case or not. He’s made it very clear in the past that in writing this movie, he wanted to revisit the Muppets of old; the Muppets of the ’80s that many of us grew up with. With a love of the characters like that, you know he’ll have the most fun in helping to really bring out the best movie.

It’s no secret that Jim Henson‘s Muppet army is raring up to make a big comeback. In March of ’08 we found out that Forgetting Sarah Marshall duo Jason Segel and Nick Stoller would be writing a new Muppet movie for Disney.

After that, we also found out that a slew of other plans were in motion as well, including TV specials, merchandise, and music albums. In case you missed it, you can catch up on all Muppet plans here and now (Read: It’s Not Meat, It’s Not Puppets “¦ It’s The Muppets & They’re Coming Back Big!).

At the time, it sounded like Segel and Stoller would actually be handling the directing duties of the movie as well — we knew that they could pull it off after seeing their work with the Henson-made Dracula puppet and their song “Dracula’s Lament” — but that’s not the case. It’s being reported that James Bobin, who co-created the popular HBO series Flight of the Conchords and helped Sascha Baron Cohen to create his multiple personalities — including Ali G, Borat, and Bruno — has now been brought in to helm the next Muppet movie.

If you’ve seen the comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, then you know the fantastic scene where star Jason Segel performs his song “Dracula’s Lament” in a bar in Hawaii. He also performs a big budget presentation of it later in the film. While appearing on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson recently, Segel actually performed the same song with a Dracula puppet in (or on) hand. If you’re a fan of the movie and this oddly catchy tune, you will definitely want to check this out.

Around the time that Sarah Marshall was on the way, we discovered that Segel and friend and writer Nick Stoller would be writing, directing, and starring in The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made for Walt Disney Studios. This is obviously exciting because it’s new Muppets, but also because we can see here that Segel is good with them!

Click on over to other side to watch the video, and if you haven’t seen it, it helps to go to YouTube or rent the movie first and check out the original performances to get a feel for this seriously silly song.

If you got the reference in the title, you’re awesome and we’re putting you right up on the fridge.

Many of us cool kids are children of the ’80s, and as such, one of the greatest forms of entertainment ever to be created, is the Muppets. The Muppets are a creation of the late genius Jim Henson, who built an army of funny and lovable puppet characters who appeared in a countless amount of TV shows, specials, movies, music videos, cartoons, and everything in between. As life moved on and new generations of kids showed up, the Muppets faded off slowly, but never completely disappeared, making delightful cameo appearances on shows and events from time to time. But now, thanks to the massive Disney D23 Expo, we’ve learned that the Muppets are coming back in a big way, and their ready to take over the world again!

Back in March of 2008, we learned that we would finally be getting a brand new Muppet movie, with Forgetting Sarah Marshall team Jason Segel and Nick Stoller joining the Jim Henson Company to write and direct a new movie. Not much else had been known about the project since that time, but Coming Soon was on hand at the Disney Expo and they passed along word that a title for this movie has been made official: The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever Made.