Last week, while I was still exhausted from my first real SXSW experience, news broke out that actor/writer Jason Segel (of TV’s Freaks and Geeks and How I Met Your Mother and the upcoming movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall) is planning a new Muppet movie. Though the announcement likely figured into my subsequent quick recovery, I wasn’t in good enough health to write about it at the time. Fortunately, now there’s more details, courtesy of MTV Movies Blog, and I’m even more giddy than before. As I figured, Segel is looking to the original Muppet flicks, specifically The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper and The Muppets Take Manhattan, which were more centered on the Muppets themselves (rather than having them dropped into pre-written classics like A Christmas Carol and Treasure Island) as they simply set out to put on a show. And as I hoped for, Segel, who is already writing the script with his Marshall co-writer/director Nick Stoller, says he’s planning for a great deal of cameos, particularly from those actors we’d all assume would be involved.

Segel revealed plans to similarly enlist big-name cameos for the flick; in fact, he’s already approached several members of the Judd Apatow stable that includes Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Kristen Wiig and Paul Rudd. “All of our friends that I’ve brought it up to are pretty excited by the prospect of it. Everyone loves the Muppets; they’ve got a warm place in most people’s hearts,” he explained. “We want a lot of cameos. You look back at Charles Grodin, Charles Durning, there were just such great performances in those movies.”

But I don’t consider Rogen, Hill, Wiig and Rudd to really be “big-name” actors. From what I could tell, many people had no clue who Rogen and Hill were when they did their thing at the Oscars this year. And I had to look up Wiig to remind me who she is. And, well, Rudd is recognizable, but I wouldn’t call him a celebrity. So hopefully Segel and Stoller will be able to branch out a bit more. The best cameos of the old movies were the quick bits with very famous faces like Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Richard Pryor, Orson Welles, Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Peter Ustinov, Liza Minnelli and Elliott Gould (in both Movie and Manhattan!). Even if they could only get as far as Steve Carell, Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, the Wilson brothers, Vince Vaughn and Jack Black, that would be okay. But really, who wouldn’t want to appear in this thing?

Meanwhile, if you’re a bit more modern in your family film appreciation, Empire has new plot info (via AICN) on the next Wallace and Gromit film, now titled A Matter of Loaf and Death, which fits perfectly with the typical W&G punny goodness. Other bread-themed puns include “Top Bun” as the name of W&G’s new bakery and “dough-eyed”, as in that’s how in enamored Wallace is with his latest love interest, Piella Bakewell (voiced by Sally Lindsay of the British soap Coronation Street). Alas, this is only a special, likely in line with Nick Park’s original Oscar-winning shorts, and not the new feature follow-up to Curse of the Were-Rabbit that is being planned (and will one day be distributed in the U.S. by Sony, which will benefit from DreamWorks’ dumping of its Aardman deal). A Matter of Loaf and Death is currently only scheduled for a TV release on BBC this Christmas, but if Park wants another Academy Award come 2009, he’ll have to get it playing in L.A. around the same time. Regardless of its Oscar consideration, though, I can’t wait to see it, in any format.