With the shocking news this week that George Lucas has sold Industrial Light and Magic, and the rights to make more Star Wars movies, to Disney, we see an opportunity.

Disney has already announced it will produce at least three more thrilling tales of Jedi knights and space battles. We'd like to suggest an excellent location for those films. Right in our back yard.

Need to film speeder bike chases, wookie villages, or ewok celebrations? We have some pretty big forests just across the Golden Ears Bridge.

Need a dank underground lair infested with monsters, gangsters, and bounty hunters? B.C. has numerous old mining sites, not to mention natural caverns.

Buildings seething with totalitarian menace, suitable HQs for jackbooted Imperial thugs? Have you seen our government offices?

Reefs? Check.

Edenic farm country? Check.

Raging rapids? Scorching deserts? Vast, snow-capped mountains and seemingly endless icefields? Check, check, and double check.

Of course, if Disney prefers to use CGI and film everything in front of greenscreens, we also have plenty of warehouses. And we can build more, especially out here in towns like Langley and Maple Ridge, where industrial land is still available - along with filming tax credits.

Langley has long been used as a backdrop for science fiction and fantasy TV, from Battlestar Galactica to the X-files, from Supernatural to Fringe. But we have yet to welcome a big budget, world-famous science fiction film franchise.

Thanks to Peter Jackson, New Zealand has become synonymous with Middle Earth. What kind of a boost would it be for B.C.'s tourism industry to be known as the location of Yavin IV, Bespin, or Mos Eisley.

C'mon, B.C. government, get on the phone with the House of Mouse, and use the Force!

- M.C.