Yesterday afternoon, my phone started buzzing with IMs and a spam of text messages. My good friend and co-founder of the San Diego Star Wars Fan Force was literally spamming me with the news that Disney had bought Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion. He initially sent me the Deadline link, which I honestly thought was some kind of April Fool’s joke that accidentally got published in October, but when the spam of texts came in…it had to be real. Disney had bought Lucasfilm, just like they did to Marvel before, and ironically this is exactly what certain Disney blogs suggested they do.

Here’s the deal. As a child of the 70s, I’m a lifelong Star Wars fan. At the same time, I’m equally as big a Disney fan. I’ve had a Disneyland annual passport for as long as I’ve lived in Southern California and it’s one membership that I’ll always maintain. So unlike most of the overreacting fans on the Internet, I’m actually very excited about what happened yesterday; especially with how Disney has handled Marvel.

The Avengers was the best movie of the summer, and that was Disney’s first full Marvel movie. The previous movies, despite Disney owning Marvel, weren’t fully handled by Disney. The Avengers was, and it turned out perfect. How easily people decide to forget that when they’re posting comments on Facebook and Twitter about how their childhood was just raped all over again.

Despite my excitement, I also am in a bit of shock. After Episode III, I came to accept that Star Wars movies were over. There wouldn’t be an Episode VII and the only Star Wars we’d ever see again would be tv shows and Expanded Universe. Now that’s all changed and there’s more Star Wars movies coming than we’d ever expected. It’s really going to take a while for this to sink in.

Lucas is still involved in the movies and has detailed plot breakdowns for not just the next trilogy, but other movies beyond that. After 7, 8, and 9 we’ll get a new Star Wars movie using the James Bond schedule. Every couple years there will be a new Star Wars movie, just like Bond. It’ll be an on-going series. Will the amount of releases cheapen what it means to see Star Wars on the big screen? I doubt it. It’ll still be STAR WARS and they’ve already hinted that the forthcoming movies following the next trilogy can explore the entire history of the Star Wars universe; that means we could see an Old Republic movie at some point.

So October 30th, 2012 will be a day long remembered by Star Wars fans. In one fell swoop we learned that Star Wars will live on, and we learned that Episode VII is a reality and will be here much sooner than any of us expected.