All summer Disney has been brilliantly marketing their fall film The Muppets with gentle jabs at the summer's blockbusters, including Green Lantern and The Hangover Part II parody trailers and a recent poster dressing up Sam the Eagle as Captain America. But with summer winding down I suppose it's time to get serious, though when you're dealing with The Muppets "serious" is always a pretty relatively term. Thus the crammed, colorful and joyous final one-sheet for The Muppets, which debuted today at Fandango and which you can also see below.



Somehow Jason Segel and Amy Adams' facial expressions keep it from looking like they're protecting us from the Muppet horde piled up behind them, but rather like they've been tossed into the giant pile of friendly puppets like E.T. amid the stuffed animals. It helps that both Segel and Adams have a "human Muppet" thing going on, with their brightly colored clothes and personalities that make you want to take them out for adorable lunch dates then skip down the street singing old Broadway songs. Yes, that sounds sickeningly cute, but so does the entire concept of The Muppets, and they've been toeing that line between cute and subversive like masters for decades now.

Lets cut to the chase here-- I want to see this movie, you want to see this movie, and everything else we see in the meantime is going to feel like marking time until the Muppets finally come back and make the world a better place. it sure makes the imminent release of The Smurfs feel even crueler, doesn't it? The Muppets finally releases us from this prison by hitting theaters on November 23.