Muppets Most Wanted at the D23 Expo

Today at Disney's D23 Expo in Anaheim, California, The Walt Disney Studios presentation, which lasted a whopping two hours, showcased the best in upcoming live action films from Disney, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and more. Among this more was Muppets Most Wanted, the upcoming Muppet movie, which commanded a lot of time and a lot of laughs during the presentation. We've managed to compile what happened in the presentation (even though we weren't there), thanks mostly to Twitter.

The Muppet portion started out by showing a longer, more detailed trailer for Muppets Most Wanted, which featured "Tina Fey singing" (@MouseInfo), "lots of good, Muppet-y gags" (@ThePlaylist), "more plot, better jokes" (@raysubers), and was "infinitely better" (@ThePlaylist) than the teaser trailer from a few days ago. There was also a lot of talk about how the trailer makes a big deal about Kermit's resemblance to Constantine. Danny Horn (@MuppetWiki) tweeted that there was a gag where "Fozzie has a newspaper with a mugshot of Constantine. Fozzie puts his finger over C's mole and Walter says, 'Hey, it's Kermit!' Fozzie takes his finger away, and Walter says, 'Wait! Where's Kermit? Where did Kermit go??'"

After the trailer, Ty Burrell drove "the tiniest car ever" (@marcgraser) onstage (which was seen in the teaser trailer) and got out to talk about his role as Interpol agent Jean-Pierre Napoleon. According to Stitch Kingdom, Burrell said that he was "'mesmerized' and told to 'stay focused' due to being Muppets starstruck." Based on both the trailer and Burrell's appearance, it seems that "Much of Muppets Most Wanted seems to be a buddy cop movie with Ty Burrell's French Interpol agent and Sam the Eagle" (@ThePlaylist). Danny Horn went on to say that Sam plays a CIA agent and he and Jean-Pierre Napoleon are forced to work together.

From Burrell's appearance, a "live" video of Miss Piggy, Tina Fey, and Kermit on the London set was shown. Piggy forced Kermit and Tina Fey to wear "P23" t-shirts (for Piggy 23). When asked what the 23 stood for, Piggy responded her age. Tina Fey turned and mouthed "No" to the camera. Kermit introduced a brand new full musical number scene. The song, apparently called "I'm Number One, You're Number Two" features Constantine and Ricky Gervais's Dominic Badguy (he's French, so it's pronounced Bad-gee, according to Danny Horn). Constantine leads the song and tells Dominic "Dance, monkey, dance" quite a lot. (Various sources for all of this.) All reports say that Constantine and the song are fantastic.

After that the Muppet portion was over, but below are a few other interesting tid-bits that happened during the presentation...

• "All the Muppets believe it's really Kermit except Animal who yells "Bad frog! Bad frog!" and bites him on the arm." - @EricIGN
• "YES, FOO-FOO IS IN THE MOVIE. Figured I'd start with that because nobody else would mention it." - @MuppetWiki
• "Danny Trejo, whose scene in a prison was cut from The Muppets, is in Muppets Most Wanted... in a scene in a prison!" - @EricIGN

And that's all we know! But based on this, Muppets Most Wanted sounds just as funny, exciting, musical, and magnificent as The Muppets. Hopefully the footage shown at the presentation will be released by Disney soon... but don't hold your breath.

The Muppet Mindset by Ryan Dosier, muppetmindset@gmail.com