By Kim Filchak

Hey, you. Yeah, you there. With the light saber and the lego Millennium Falcon. You wanna be in the next Star Wars movie?

How many of us grew up dreaming of hearing that question? Well my fellow scruffy looking Nerf Herders and Sith Lord wannabes I am here to tell you the time is now, you can finally make all of your childhood dreams come true and actually have the chance to appear in the next Star Wars movie! And no, it is not being filmed in the back of my nondescript white van. But good on you for checking!

J.J. Abrams has an offer for you. Donate $10.00 or more to UNICEF and you will be entered into a drawing to win the perk package of a lifetime! If your name gets pulled you and one companion (only one, no hiding anyone else in your luggage) will be flown as guests of J. J. Abrams to the Pinewood Studios set where Episode VII is being filmed. Once there the lucky winner and guest (again, no stowaways in the luggage) will be handed off to costume and makeup teams to be “transformed” and made ready for their roles in the next Star Wars movie. Just what those roles might be is still a mystery. Maybe you will be an X wing pilot, or maybe Chip, Jabba the Hutt’s second cousin twice removed. Or you could be that dude in the background in a full face tentacle mask looking menacingly at the heroes as they bargain with Chip, Jabba’s second cousin twice removed, for passage off of the dirt ball backwater planetoid they are stuck on! The possibilities are endless! Unless you want to play Han Solo, I am sorry to say that role is already cast and Harrison Ford could probably take you if you tried to fight him for it.

Here, I will let your potential benefactor J.J. Abrams explain the deal himself.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfNiC9iKM0Q]

Disney and Lucas Arts have always had a long tradition of commitment to charity, this time they are joining together with Bad Robot to create “The Force for Change” campaign. The whole thing is being run by the charitable group Omaze, who have run several similar deals, with packages for charity, in the past. They have used the same raffle based enticements for donations involving everything from riding in a tank with Arnold Schwarzenegger, to dinner with George Clooney all the way to NOT making meth with Bryan Cranston, because he is a perfectly nice man and not anything at all like Heisenberg.

The science of the system is pretty simple, everyone who donates the initial minimum $10.00 becomes a “Founding member” of the campaign and is entered in to the pool from which the lucky winner will be chosen. However, much like with a kickstart fund raiser, the more you put in the more you get out. The more you donate, not only are the odds of you being selected greater, but you get some pretty sweet rewards as well. Donating up to $50,000 not only vastly increases your odds in being the “chosen one” but you’ll also get to see the movie before anyone else at private screening Lucasfilm’s will organize for you the day before Star Wars: Episode VII‘s release in December 2015. Other less extravagant perk packages will be T-shirts, Millennium Falcon posters, and lightsaber hilts, basically the usual awesome stuff we all covet.

So there you have it, the chance to make your childhood (and in some of our cases late adulthood) dreams come true. I would wish you luck but I have to go cash out my 401k.