With all the hype around Star Wars: The Force Awakens, I was inspired to create this survey to gauge how fans felt about different aspects of the Star Wars Universe.

NOTES

I really underestimated the time it would take to put this together. I exported all the data into a spreadsheet and basically created each graph on its own. This gave me more freedom in the presentation, but it also means it took a long time (a little over 15 hours). For some of the graphs, I sorted the responses highest to lowest for presentation. I tried to keep the graph-type selection as consistent as possible but there are some inconsistencies that I chose for a variety of reasons. In some graphs you’ll see the numbers add up to only 99% – this is due to rounding. In some places I analyzed some of the results against different subsets (just tried to pick out anything of interest). Due to some of the small sample sizes of some of the subsets, some of these conclusions may not be statistically significant.

TL;DR – I’m not a statistician and this is all for fun

LICENSING

The results and presentation of this survey are free use, although I am not planning on sharing the raw data. The only thing I ask is if you do re-use these results you shoot me a note at starwarssurvey@gmail.com. You don’t need to ask my permission, I’m just curious how you’re using it

SAMPLE SIZE

The survey was advertised in two main places over the course of a few weeks: (1) The movies and Star Wars subs on Reddit, and (2) IMDB. In all, we received 2,712 total responses. I then pared the responses down based on three questions:

“Are you a Star Wars fan?” 113 people said NO or NOT SURE. Since we want to target Star Wars fans, I removed these responses “Are you familiar with Peter Maple’s contributions to the Star Wars universe?” I don’t know who Peter Maple is, but 209 people said they did, and thus I removed their responses, figuring they were just clicking through arbitrarily and skewing the data “Which Star Wars movies have you seen?” 331 people said they had not seen ANY Star Wars movies. While it’s possible some of these people were just really into the books or TV shows and just hadn’t gotten around to the movies, the more likely scenario is they just skipped the question, which calls into question how seriously they took the rest of the questions. Because come on….what kind of Star Wars fan has never seen a Star Wars movie?

That left us with 2,059 responses. So let’s get into the data…

DEMOGRAPHICS

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Star Wars fans polled here were overwhelmingly white, single, childless males between 18-34 years old

The only one of these that surprised me was the gender; I expected more than 3% females

EXPERIENCES

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Only 8% said their friends got them into Star Wars. Overwhelmingly it was a family connection (you or your parents). This could be due to most people being under 8 when they first saw a Star Wars movie, before your friends started introducing you to things

54% said their parents got them into Star Wars, indicating Star Wars is one of those things fans pass on to their children

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You may be expecting the vast majority of people to think the right age to introduce Star Wars to kids would be the same as when they were introduced. It was a majority, but only about 59%. The other 41% thought it should be different, with the general feeling being you should wait until kids are older than they were

The fans who already have children generally thought you should introduce your kids to Star Wars earlier than those without kids

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The fact that these add up to 100% is just a coincidence, as they are mutually inclusive

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I thought it’d be interesting to compare these results to the scores on IMDB. Overall the prequels, the Clone Wars, and Rebels had higher scores on IMDB, and the originals were the opposite

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72% of fans had read at least one Star Wars book, and of those, the majority read over four

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Despite Star Wars revolutionizing special effects in film, they ranked the lowest in importance to fans. One wonders how much the prequels influenced these rankings, as many criticized them as being style over substance

Many would probably agree that Star Wars has had great special effects, music, and mythology, yet it was Characters that topped the list here. When you consider that even though a bounty hunter named Boba Fett, who had fewer than ten minutes of total screen time in the original films, became a cult star, Star Wars has done a fabulous job at creating engaging, memorable characters

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Star Wars on the brain! Over half of fans said they thought about Star Wars every few days or more. It makes more sense when you consider how pervasive Star Wars has been in our culture. Just think about how many references there have been in TV and movies (see below). They even play Imperial March at football games. Star Wars is everywhere

http://starwarsfans.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_references_to_Star_Wars_in_movies

http://starwarsfans.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_references_to_Star_Wars_in_television

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These were much closer than it looks visually (I had trouble with the Excel graph settings). People still have an overall favorable impression of George Lucas, and are VERY high on JJ Abrams

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It was surprising that 34% had seen the 1978 Christmas Special but only 8% had seen Star Wars in Concert. This may be due to the accessibility of the former online, whereas the latter requires you to have been physically present at the event

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Unfortunately I was not able to collect written responses due to limitations of the survey version I used, or I would have asked who you’ve met

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I highly recommend this documentary, which can be found online

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The special editions in the late 1990s allowed a new generation to see the films in theaters. I know several theaters are doing a marathon of all the films in anticipation for The Force Awakens, so there is an opportunity for these 64% to see the films the way they were meant to be seen

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This is another one where I wished I could have collected qualitative responses. I wonder if you took out Imperial March how many would have still said yes. Actually, with this crowd, probably most

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Overall these numbers were much higher than I was expecting, and now I feel slightly less nerdy for owning Star Wars Trivial Pursuit

Fun fact: 20th Century Fox gave up the merchandising rights away to Lucas for almost nothing because they didn’t see much value in it

FAVORITES

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Darth Vader and Han Solo finished in a tie, with Luke and Obi-Wan close behind before the drop off. Poor Salacious Crumb finished dead last

The highest prequel-only character was Darth Maul, who had the least amount of screen time out of all the prequel-only characters

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The hardy rebel alliance starfighter responsible for taking out two death stars and flying Luke across the galaxy takes the top spot

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No surprise here – the coolest ship in the galaxy takes the top spot by a wide margin

Not much love for the Nebulon-B Frigate, which I always thought had a really cool design

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This came down to the wire but Luke and Vader’s first meeting just barely edged out their final meeting

THE ORIGINAL TRILOGY

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This was slightly different than the other question ‘What was the most important part of Star Wars to YOU’, in which people answered ‘Characters’. Characters did score high here as well, but Mythology took over the top spot when we asked people what the overall reason for success was

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5% obviously belongs to Han Solo’s legal team. I’m really glad to see this at 90%

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Gary was the producer on Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back

Irvin was Lucas’ professor at USC and the director of The Empire Strikes Back

Lawrence co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. He is also co-writing the new movies

Ralph was a conceptual artist who Lucas hired in 1975. The studio had trouble buying into Lucas’ script on its own. Ralph’s paintings helped to convince the studio to fund Star Wars

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Lucas released the special editions because he said he couldn’t realize his original vision in the 1970s/80s due to finite funds and technology. However only 19% said the special editions made the originals better

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This one surprised me. I had always thought Vader’s face was better left to the imagination, but the vast majority is glad we got to see his face

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We always hear about the hate for the Ewoks, but it wasn’t as dramatic as I had anticipated. Only 23% were unfavorable or worse. There was also an age correlation here – in general, the younger you are, the more favorable you are to the Ewoks

THE PREQUEL TRILOGY

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I can’t remember any Star Wars fan who wasn’t excited about the prequels. According to the rating prediction questions, cynicism has increased since, but only slightly

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Broken down by age, the younger you are, the more likely you think the hate has gone too far. In fact it went up for each age group. This makes sense, as the younger fans are also the same people who rated the prequels higher

You may be wondering if there was a Mr. Plinkett correlation here, and there is! Non-fans of Plinkett’s score for this question average 1.21 (that translates to “it’s too much”). Those who haven’t seen the Plinkett reviews averaged 1.46, and fans of Plinkett averaged 1.75 (out of 3)

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Even those who liked the prequels agreed…more collaboration would have benefited the prequels

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4% of people LOVE those little Jedi bacteria!

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Overwhelmingly people thought Jackson was a good choice. Broken down by race – black people liked him in the role the best, then whites, then Hispanics, then Asians

THE NEW MOVIES

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Overall, most people are confident in the cast for the new movies

Broken down by some of the demographics, black people were the LEAST favorable towards John Boyega out of all the races surveyed. The age group who were most favorable to John Boyega was the 13-17 year old demographic

Hispanics were the most confident in Oscar Isaac, while blacks were the least confident in him

Hispanics were the most confident in Daisy Ridley, while blacks were the least confident in her. Women scored Daisy 4.37 compared to men who scored her 4.16. Not much of a difference, but there was still a difference. Whites and Asians tended to be in the middle of these analyses

Fans were mixed on the releasing of previous canon materials. I’m actually surprised this wasn’t more unfavorable considering how much extended Star Wars universe material you all have consumed

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The fans were clear here – we don’t want to see our hero turn to the dark side. While they could be setting him up for some kind of story arc over the 3 movies, it’d have to be a very compelling story considering Luke didn’t have that much of a reason to turn to the dark side in the originals

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Overall, most people think the hype level is appropriate, while 19% think there still some hype we’re leaving on the table somehow!

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29% predicts the IMDB rating for the Force Awakens in 10 years will be 9 or higher. That would put it only behind The Shawshank Redemption, The Godfather, and The Godfather 2! I love the optimism

Almost half predicted the IMDB score would be 8, which would put it around 200th in IMDB’s rankings