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The Force is Strong With Disney XD’s Star Wars Rebels

Siths about to get real, people!

As the long-awaited Star Wars: The Force Awakens hyperdrives into theaters this month, the action on Disney XD’s Star Wars Rebels is heating up too. Just don’t call it a kids’ show.

“We do get rather dark and more serious this season, because the story has to go that way,” teases executive producer Dave Filoni. Set five years before 1977’s original, A New Hope, this CGI series about a band of do-gooders in the early battle against Darth Vader’s tyranny not only balances the grim realities of civil war with blasts of goofy humor, but it is also the network’s No. 1 show among adults 18–49 and a canon-expanding essential for everyone obsessed with that galaxy far, far away—no matter their age.

“For my generation, it’s the norm to be into Star Wars,” says Filoni, 41. “There was no such thing as a ‘Star Wars fan.’ You were just a kid lucky enough to grow up with this awesome entertainment.” Fittingly, it was Filoni’s lifelong affinity for all things Jedi that landed him within the beloved franchise’s expanded universe on TV.

“I thought it was a practical joke,” he says of the 2005 call he got from Lucasfilm Animation while working on Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender. “I almost hung up on them because I thought it was my friends giving me a hard time.” Instead, Filoni was interviewed by George Lucas himself, who immediately hired him to direct Star Wars: The Clone Wars, 2008’s big-screen animated flick that takes place between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. After that, Filoni transitioned to overseeing Cartoon Network’s The Clone Wars, the ongoing tale of clone troopers, Obi-Wan Kenobi and the pre–dark side Anakin Skywalker. Yet unlike the Jedi Council’s most notorious turncoat, Filoni proudly states, “Since ’05, I’ve been quite literally studying the ways of the Force year in, year out, trying to improve my skills.”

Seven years after Filoni’s first meeting with Lucas, in another corner of the galaxy, big-screen film producer and writer Simon Kinberg (X-Men: First Class, The Martian) was earning his X-wings via a two-week powwow with a crew of writers and consultants—including Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi scribe Lawrence Kasdan—all recruited by Lucasfilm before its sale to Disney to map out the next wave of Star Wars stories. “We operated like a little TV writers’ room and just talked about what we would love to see in future Star Wars sagas,” recalls Kinberg, a creative consultant on The Force Awakens.

The confab also led to his alliance with Kiri Hart, head of development at Lucasfilm, and the birth of Rebels. “She sent me an email afterward saying, ‘We’re thinking about doing a new animated show. I know you’re excited about writing things that your kids can grab hold of, so do you think you’d be interested?’” One excited reply yes—“in all caps and with 10 exclamation points”—later and, Kinberg says, “That was the beginning.”

So, like Han and Luke before them, Kinberg and Filoni united to form what Kinberg calls “a family unit crossed with the A-Team” for Disney XD’s 2014 pilot Star Wars Rebels: Spark of Rebellion. The story featured de facto leader Kanan Jarrus (voiced by Freddie Prinze Jr.), a cowboy Jedi who survived the Emperor’s Order 66 decree to kill off his entire kind; Twi’lek Hera Syndulla (Vanessa Marshall), an ace pilot of the spacecraft The Ghost and newly minted captain of the rebel cell known as Phoenix Squadron; Sabine Wren (Tiya Sircar), a Mandalorian graffiti artist with mad explosives skills and a murky past; Zeb (Steve Blum), a hulking, smart-mouth alien sworn to making the Empire pay for slaughtering his species; and Ezra Bridger (Taylor Gray), a teen grifter from the planet Lothal.

Currently in its wildly entertaining second season (Season 3 will premiere in 2016)—and filled with animation inspired by the original trilogy’s late conceptual designer, Ralph McQuarrie—Rebels’ deepening mythology is largely linked to the nascent Jedi powers and orphan status of the Luke Skywalker–esque Ezra.

“He’s got some more wisdom now. He knows how to use the Force a little bit,” explains Gray, teasing a “huge” upcoming storyline about Ezra’s mother and father, long believed to have been executed for speaking out against the Empire when he was 7. “This whole story with his parents has been looming over him. He’s accomplished a lot over the course of the first season and has found his own family with the rebel group,” the actor continues. “The one question that’s still unanswered for him is: What happened to his parents?” The answer to that, Gray hints, “will determine what Ezra’s fate is.”

In other major storylines this season, Kevin McKidd of Grey’s Anatomy will voice a new Mandalorian character, potentially linked to Sabine’s soon-to-be-revealed backstory (“She’s as important to the series as Ezra, as far as who this show is about,” Filoni hints). The Jedi-hunting Inquisitor known as the Seventh Sister (voiced by Prinze’s wife, Sarah Michelle Gellar) is set to cause trouble for Kanan. And Ahsoka Tano (Ashley Eckstein), Anakin Skywalker’s former Padawan introduced in The Clone Wars, may get the goods on her old master. Despite a handful of appearances on Rebels, the fan favorite has yet to untangle her ties to Darth Vader, nor has it been revealed why Ahsoka was never seen in the prequel films or what she’s been up to since leaving the Jedi Order during the Clone Wars. Given that we’ll definitely be seeing Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones, no less) again, along with Frank Oz’s legendary Yoda (who has previously only been heard on screen) and at least one major legacy character from the films, this could mean that we will finally have some answers about Ahsoka’s missing 15 years.

“I want to know too!” Eckstein exclaims. “I do hope that we get to explore that someday, but at least we get the story that we’re [building] to now: more Ahsoka, more Darth Vader. I can promise it’ll blow people’s minds.”

Filoni, meanwhile, is intent on not blowing any future plot twists, keeping them more guarded than plans for a Death Star. When asked what lies ahead, he simply allows that the whole Ghost crew is in for a wild ride. “The dark side is growing…and the more ripples Ezra makes, the more powerful he becomes.”

It seems the Force is strong with this one too.

Star Wars Rebels airs Wednesdays, 9:30/8:30c, Disney XD

Girl Power: TV’s Newest Hero Takes Flight in Supergirl

Even for Supergirl, time flies when you’re having fun.

“It’s crazy. I went in for this the day after Halloween last year,” a smiling Melissa Benoist recalls of her audition for Supergirl, CBS’s bright new superhero show about the Man of Steel’s equally fortified cousin. “I thought there was no chance—I had brown hair,” and the DC Comics character is well known for her blonde locks. “I’m just a weird girl, and I think they liked that.”

It’s impossible not to like Benoist. Sitting outside her trailer on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, California, while she plays with her dog, Farley, the newly blonded 27-year-old Littleton, Colorado, native is as effortlessly attractive as she is approachable. Her down-to-earth vibe is refreshing and a tad startling, given her high-profile gig on one of this season’s biggest gambles. After all, Supergirl—which finally takes off on October 26—is the first comic book–based, female-driven superhero drama on television since The WB’s short-lived Birds of Prey in 2002; the character’s 1984 big-screen debut was a dud; and it’s not airing on The CW, home to DC Comics’ current TV crown jewels, Arrow and The Flash.

Thankfully, the superfriends behind those heroic hits are the ones bringing Benoist’s Kara Zor-El, last daughter of Krypton, to the airwaves. Indeed, DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. knew exactly who to ask about adapting another icon. “One of the executives mentioned the character of Supergirl,” says Greg Berlanti, teaming again with his Flash and Arrow executive producers Andrew Kreisberg and Sarah Schechter, along with Glee’s Ali Adler, one of his cohorts on the relatives-with-powers dramedy No Ordinary Family. “[But] they saw the show more as her without a cape, a teenage-girl-growing-up-on-a-farm kind of thing.” Not interested in doing Smallville: The Training-Bra Years, Berlanti and Co. pitched a more adult origin story with “the same size and scope as The Flash and Arrow but with its own adult identity. CBS loved it, and we got a show!”

Introduced in a 1959 issue of Action Comics, Kara has a backstory similar to her more famous kin. “She was 12 years old when Krypton was destroyed, and she escaped the destruction at the same time as her infant cousin,” Benoist explains. In the Supergirl premiere, she is sent to Earth by her parents, Zor-El (Robert Gant) and Alura (Laura Benanti), to watch over baby Kal-El, “but she gets stuck in space for a long time, and when she gets to Earth, he’s already matured. So she makes this decision that since Earth already has a hero, she doesn’t need to use her powers.”

Instead, Kara blends in as the adopted daughter of the Danvers (in a fun nod to the mythos, they are played by big-screen Supergirl Helen Slater and Lois & Clark’s Dean Cain), a family of scientists in the fictional and very Los Angeles–like National City. With a protective adoptive sister, Alex (Chyler Leigh), and the kind of glasses that have been known to hide secret identities, the Kara we meet in the pilot has grown up to become a sweetly nerdy assistant to media maven Cat Grant (Calista Flockhart) with undeveloped powers and no clue that her CatCo colleague Winn (Jeremy Jordan) has it bad for her.

Of course, even superheroes in denial can’t sit still when a plane carrying a loved one is about to go down, so before you can say, “It’s a bird…,” Kara takes to the friendly skies to rescue Alex. In the process, she attracts all sorts of attention—most notably from Hank Henshaw (David Harewood), head of the Department of Extra-Normal Operations, a shadowy government organization, and one James Olsen (Mehcad Brooks), who has been deployed from Metropolis by Supes himself to play Obi-Wan to the fledgling hero.

Not that she needs a man to save the day. Or a Superman. While plenty of DC characters, like Lucy Lane (Jenna Dewan-Tatum), Red Tornado (Iddo Goldberg), Maxwell Lord (Peter Facinelli) and Kryptonian villain Non (Chris Vance), are set to appear, the oft-mentioned boy scout in the sky is most definitely not one of them. “I compare him to Veep’s [unseen] president,” Berlanti jokes. “He is out there and Metropolis exists, but hopefully, people watching the series will quickly go, ‘We don’t even need him!’”

All Supergirl really needs is for viewers to see past the whole “girl” part. “Ultimately, what we want to do is appeal to everyone,” Schechter offers. “The notion that guys won’t watch girls has been completely destroyed by things like Frozen and Mad Max: Fury Road. For us, this is just a show about an incredibly interesting character going through something exceptional.”

Adler echoes that equal-rights-for-equal-flights sentiment. “The Supergirl property is the gold standard for female superheroes, but in watching the action and what Kara comes up against emotionally, you go in seeing a female superhero and you come out seeing a powerful superhero. Her gender doesn’t really matter. Ultimately, it’s just about this triumphant person.”

What did matter, however, was finding an ingenue capable of convincingly rocking a caped ensemble designed by Oscar winner Colleen Atwood (who also created the looks Stephen Amell and Grant Gustin sport on Arrow and The Flash), battling an array of aliens-of-the-week unleashed by Kara’s arrival on Earth and balancing comedy, drama, action and adorableness. For that magic combo, the producers turned to the unsung hero of DC Comics’ growing TV dynasty, casting director David Rapaport.

“We saw thousands of people, but I will say that all credit goes to David,” Schechter says of the man we have to thank for stocking The CW’s hero brigade. “He had a really good feeling about Melissa, just like he had a really good feeling about Stephen Amell and Grant Gustin.” And just like those two, Benoist—best known for her role as Glee’s sweet, shy Marley Rose—was the first to read for the role. “David actually made Melissa come back early from a trip and signed her in himself so she would be first because he knew that Greg is a little bit superstitious,” Schechter says.

“She is the female Grant,” Kreisberg adds. “Watching them on set, it’s not just the talent or how they inhabit the part; it’s their joy and enthusiasm that they get to do this, which is in a way who these characters are.”

Walking back into the soundstage to film the first scene with Jordan, Brooks and Leigh in what will become Team Supergirl’s secret CatCo control room, Benoist still seems genuinely astonished that she gets to do this for a living. “I love Kara,” she says, exuding the same sunny determination as the character. “She truly believes that she’s going to change and save the world. And I think she’s going to do it.”

Attagirl!

Supergirl premieres Monday, Oct. 26, 8:30/7:30c, CBS, then moves to Mondays, 8/7c, starting Nov. 2.

America’s Favorite Felt Heroes Return to TV in ABC’s The Muppets

It may not be easy being green, but it’s about to get a lot more fun for the world’s most famous amphibian when the Muppets make their overdue return to TV this fall.

“It’s wonderful, isn’t it?” marvels Kermit the Frog, ringleader of the beloved menagerie at the center of ABC’s The Muppets. Indeed it is. The latest entry in the crew’s anthropomorphic oeuvre—a gag-packed, behind-the-scenes look at a late-night talk show, hosted by Miss Piggy, natch—is a joyful mash-up of The Office and The Larry Sanders Show, as performed by felt animals. Including, literally, Animal.

“We are doing something that hasn’t been done before—two shows at the same time,” Kermit says. “One of them, the most important one, is a late-night show called Up Late With Miss Piggy.” The other is a backstage documentary being filmed about the making of Piggy’s chatfest, but if you ask the Up Late hostess, it’s really all about her. Like most things.

“You know, the fans always want more these days, and so we decided, actually I decided, to let a team of documentarians follow me wherever I went,” the ageless blonde diva says. “I’m completely comfortable with giving my fans an all-access pass.”

She’s in good hands (no pun intended). The Muppets comes after multiple attempts to reboot the franchise. “It happens every 20 years: 1976 was The Muppet Show, 1996 was Muppets Tonight, and now this one,” points out Debbie McClellan, vice president of The Muppets Studio. “We had a lot of people trying to bring the gang back in some form.” The popularity of the recent films The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted certainly helped audiences get reacquainted with Kermit and Co. Among their biggest supporters was executive producer Bill Prady (The Big Bang Theory). “I started talking about this particular project 10 years ago, and eight years ago we even shot some test footage,” he says of his previous stalled pitches. “Back then, the feeling was that the timing just wasn’t right. Now, apparently, it is!” It’s also right that the obviously patient Prady be the one to bring the Muppets back to primetime: After all, he got his start writing for Muppet creator Jim Henson in 1982 after leaving his job (and eventual BBT inspiration) as a computer programmer.

“Jim was producing a show about technology at the time—though it wound up never getting made—and I was hired to be a production assistant and researcher because I had that computer background,” he says. “The Muppet offices in those days were in this amazing townhouse on a residential street on the Upper East Side of New York City. Imagine what the Muppet-iest old New York mansion would look like if you got it exactly right. It was like going to Kermit the Frog’s house every day!”

After working with writers like Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) and several Sesame Street scribes on that project, Prady moved to the company’s licensing and merchandising department, cranking out copy for everything from Muppet-themed computer software to the packaging for Kermit the Frog plush toys. “I looked around and said, ‘I will take any job here. Any job.’”

That willingness earned Prady the attention of Henson, and he quickly moved on to penning Muppet comic books, jokes for the Dial-a-Muppet phone line (yep, that was a real thing) and episodes of 1987’s Fraggle Rock: The Animated Series before landing a full-time position on 1989’s The Jim Henson Hour. That anthology featuring the icon’s top-tier Muppets as well as newbies (who remembers the semirobotic Digit? Exactly) vanished after nine episodes, but it solidified Prady’s place in the puppet-verse. “My Muppet experience,” he recalls fondly, “was working with Jim Henson every day.” Fittingly, Prady earned an Emmy nod in 1991 for cowriting the tribute special The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson following the legend’s passing the previous year.

Of course, a lot has changed since Henson unleashed his globally adored puppets. Originally introduced in 1955 on Washington, D.C.’s daily Sam and Friends sketch series, several of the characters soon found a home in 1969 on Sesame Street (a Children’s Television Workshop production, and separate from The Muppets Studio), while a new batch of Henson creations was featured in regular bits on the first season of Saturday Night Live in 1975 and 1976. Along the way, there have been eight feature films, countless guest appearances, TV movies and specials, the aforementioned Jim Henson Hour and 1996’s equally brief Muppets Tonight.

No matter the missteps, it has always been the group’s comedy-variety hit The Muppet Show, which ran from 1976 to 1981, that remains the gold standard. The show was filled with celebrity guests, goofy sketches and fresh furry faces like Gonzo and Fozzie, and the backstage mayhem at Muppet Theater was weekly, wickedly funny proof that these creatures could appeal to kids and their parents. In fact, one of the two pilot episodes for The Muppet Show parodied the growing amount of sex and violence on TV at the time. “The Muppets can go on Good Morning America and Saturday Night Live…on the same day,” McClellan says. “We don’t talk down to our audiences, and we’re never mean to each other. We speak to the fans with a smart, sophisticated humor. That, I think, has always been the key to the Muppets—that kind of comedy.”

For the new series to work, the producers looked to the past for an idea on how to drive that comedy. “When The Muppet Show came on in the 1970s, the dominant form of entertainment on TV was still the variety show,” Prady explains, citing everyone from Sonny and Cher to the Smothers Brothers. “The Muppet Show was mocking [that format]. If Jim Henson were alive today, he wouldn’t make a variety show, because that’s not what’s big on TV. He’d look at the mock-documentary style that came to the U.S. from England—The Office and Parks and Recreation and Modern Family—and say, ‘Let’s try to make fun of that.’”

And we bet he’d be proud. The 10-minute trailer Prady and company pitched to ABC, with its legalized marijuana joke and edgy innuendo-laden gags, is both nostalgia heaven and as sharp and relevant as ever. That’s thanks in large part to the decision to give the Muppets actual backstories—Fozzie is dating a human! Rowlf runs a tavern!—and set them in the real world, while also honoring their Muppet Show roots as the most diverse cast working in showbiz. That’s right: The entire puppet posse is on staff at Up Late. “Kermit is the executive producer of the show and he deals with the very difficult host in Miss Piggy,” laughs cocreator Bob Kushell. “Fozzie is the sidekick and warm-up act, Gonzo is the head writer with Rizzo the Rat and Pepe the King Prawn working for him, and Scooter is the talent coordinator/scout.”

In addition, a parade of celebrity guests will be visiting Piggy’s show. (The original series featured Julie Andrews, Johnny Cash and Elton John, to name just a few.) Up Late’s “live” studio audience will include those beloved balcony curmudgeons Statler and Waldorf, the house band will be Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, the Swedish Chef is handling catering, and Sam the Eagle is sure to be hawking around the wings now that he’s landed the perfect gig in Standards and Practices.

It’s a roster that should entice the most jaded star (and animal control officer), yet at least one key player involved seems to be looking down her snout at the assembled employees. “You know, if I had been hiring, it would’ve been a completely different staff,” confesses the notoriously picky Piggy. “The one thing I like is that Fozzie does my preshow warm-up, and he’s absolutely horrible at it. That’s a good thing for me, because he sets the bar low and then people can enjoy moi even more.”

Miss Piggy’s disdain may be related to issues more personal than personnel, and it is so far the only sign of backstage drama as Up Late—and The Muppets—heads into production. “Coming together to develop and create this world has been such an amazing process,” says Kushell, speaking for, we assume, the show’s human contingent. As for the rest of the Muppets, it sounds like they too are all about making sure their new show reestablishes the rainbow connection with fans. And Kermit, for one, is thrilled to have at least some of that pressure off what he calls his “nonexistent shoulders.”

“You can do anything with them,” he raves, always so supportive of his zoological crew. “And many of them just work for food. That’s always nice.”

Better get busy, Chef!

The Muppets premieres Tuesday, Sept. 22, 8/7c, ABC.

Shark and Awe: Summer’s Guiltiest Pleasure Returns With Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!

Stomp aside, Indominus Rex. Jurassic World’s designer dino has nothing on the true king of hybrid menaces: the improbable and seemingly unstoppable mash-up of disaster movies and apex predators known as Sharknado. And with Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!, the third blast of shark-infested high winds and higher camp, they’ve gone and gotten a much bigger boat.

“It’s so strange: We’re a little TV movie, and everyone is treating it like a huge summer blockbuster,” marvels Anthony C. Ferrante, the trilogy’s director, still stunned at the franchise’s ferocious success. He’s not alone. Almost everyone involved in 2013’s original Sharknado was awash in disbelief when the masses devoured the cheapo flick, which saw Los Angeles being assaulted by a cheesy, shark-tossing tornado. “I never thought the movie would even see the light of day,” confesses Ian Ziering, whose heroic ex-surfer and pun-fully named Fin Shepard has since become the series’ Bruce Willis of murderous makos. “I assumed it would come and go.”

“When I read the script, I was laughing so hard,” echoes Tara Reid, who stars as Fin’s wife, April Wexler. “It was like, ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ It was the silliest movie I have ever read.” And that was before the LOL-worthy title even happened. “Originally, Ian and I signed on when it was called Dark Skies,” Reid reveals. “Then in the first week of filming they changed the name to Sharknado, and we were both like, ‘Nooo! You can’t call it that!’ But they said to trust them, and it turns out Syfy, Anthony and the producers knew what they were doing.”

Initially, the ratings for the first airing of Sharknado “were good but not great,” recalls Syfy’s Chris Regina, the senior vice president of program strategy who oversees the network’s original movies. But a groundswell of online attention proved there was definitely blood in the water. The key was simply baiting more viewers. “So we added additional airings because of the buzz we were getting, and it exploded.”

Riding the tide of those encore presentations and the WTF fascination of social media (even Mia Farrow live-tweeted), Ferrante’s “little TV movie” suddenly became the biggest splash of that summer, leading to theatrical showings, late-night talk-show jokes, and the kind of media hype usually reserved for feature-film epics. “The first movie had very little marketing. They treated it like the regular Syfy TV movie, and there is nothing wrong with that,” Ferrante says. “Then it began gaining traction, and it blew up on the re-airings, it blew up Twitter. The thing that’s wonderful about the first Sharknado is that people found us; we didn’t force people to watch it. That is what makes it special.”

It’s also what made 2014’s sequel a no-brainer. “We had all the ingredients that we knew had made the movie a success,” offers Regina, adding that recapturing TV’s weirdest lightning in a bottle meant mixing more juice into the recipe. Sharknado 2: The Second One boasted a bigger budget, better effects and a move to the Big Apple, where the newly reunited Fin and April battled both another storm and monster expectations. Wisely, Syfy went hard with the marketing, complete with a branded presence at Comic-Con in San Diego, which helped turn last summer’s brilliantly absurd follow-up into the network’s most-watched original movie ever, with 3.9 million viewers. And again, jaws hit the ground as fast as the film’s exploding shark parts. “I thought we’d maybe get close to the numbers we did on the first one,” admits Ferrante. “I didn’t expect this to blow up a second time. Now, to be sitting here two and a half years after we shot the first movie with a TV Guide Magazine cover and a third movie where we have spanned multiple states? It’s pretty incredible.”

For Oh Hell No!, the whole gang—Ferrante, Ziering, Reid and the trilogy’s screenwriter, Thunder Levin—reconvened on the East Coast for a shoot that lasted less than three weeks, and this time, the forecast called for more madness than ever. “When we were developing this one, people were saying that they weren’t sure how we could top the second one. It was so jam-packed with stuff,” Ferrante says. “And I would say I don’t know how we can top this one. There are literally ideas for four Sharknado movies crammed into one film…and it works!”

Opening in Washington, D.C., with Fin preparing to receive the Medal of Freedom from the president (played by Mark Cuban, of Shark Tank, natch) for saving L.A. and New York, No. 3 benefited from being part of a national treasure in its own right. With the Sharknado brand so amusingly beloved, production was able to secure clearance to shoot all around the capital, lending a level of authenticity to the most unrealistic film since, well, No. 2. “We had access to some incredible places,” raves Ziering of filming at the Washington Monument and outside 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. “When you’re part of a megahit, apparently people are happy to open their doors and work with you.”

Before you can say “Beltway,” however, Fin’s celebration with the commander in chief turns cataclysmic after a massive new sharknado develops over the city, triggering a sequence Ferrante calls “White House Down with sharks—the metaphor there is that they’re terrorists,” he explains, giddily recounting how this bit allowed for a dose of amped-up, military-style action. “This story gave us a chance to have a gun-toting president, and Ian has a machine gun. It gave us the opportunity to do something we haven’t done before in these movies.”

Another first for the franchise is filming in multiple locales. With the entire Eastern seaboard under attack by sharknado cells (damn you, global warming!), Oh Hell No! goes on a road trip as Fin races to Florida, where the now-pregnant April; their daughter, Claudia (Ryan Newman); and April’s mom, May (Bo Derek), are celebrating Claudia’s 18th birthday. As with Washington, Ferrante and company were granted carte blanche to shoot extensively at Universal Studios, Orlando. Yes, there are sharks in the park.

“Sharknadoes tend to follow us everywhere, if you haven’t noticed,” laughs Reid, whose character now sports what Ziering jokingly calls a “go-go gadget” prosthetic, having lost her hand to a midair shark attack in The Second One. “So it makes perfect sense that another one would start where my husband is, then come to me!”

Just as in the previous outings, this wild ride is filled with blood and guts and goofy deaths. “We do a little more evisceration in this one,” previews Ferrante. “There is a great, amazing kill that is prolonged and agonizing for the character. But it’s really cool. We do some horrible things to the victims.”

There’s also a flood of celebrity cameos, including retired L.A. Laker Rick Fox, Playboy models Holly Madison and Kendra Wilkinson, magicians Penn and Teller, NYSNC-er Chris Kirkpatrick, WWE star Chris Jericho and talk-show host Jerry Springer. Along the way, Malcolm in the Middle’s Frankie Muniz turns up as a storm chaser working with the original film’s Nova Clarke (Cassie Scerbo, reprising her role), and, in keeping with the franchise’s family-first theme, slow-motion beach icon David Hasselhoff surfaces as Fin’s father, Gil, a former astronaut whose NASA connections could help save the world. How, exactly, we can’t even begin to explain.

“[The whole thing] is tongue-in-cheek!” Ziering says, as if anyone needs reminding that the fate of mankind is in the hands of a Baywatcher and a teen idol turned Chippendale. “It is preposterous. There are sharks in tornadoes! It’s so far-fetched, you can only suspend disbelief to enjoy it.”

And that is exactly why we love this series so much and why everyone from Syfy to Ferrante to the stars are banking on endless summers of sharknadoes. “So much of the film is a social experience with the fans, and that really helps educate us,” Regina says of gauging the potential for a fourth movie. “I have an idea of where we can go in the next movie, but they could be demanding something else after this that could change my mind.”

One mind that won’t be swayed is Ziering’s. He’s hooked, wherever the next one may be headed. “I would love to be a part of this project for many years to come,” the actor says. “It’s entertainment, and I’m having fun at the same time. So why get off a boat that isn’t sinking?”

Hmmm…Sharknado at sea? Oh, hell yes!

Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! airs Wednesday, July 22, 9/8c, Syfy