P5 A

P5 A – The product’s impact and effect on the audience

Star Wars has had a huge impact on its audience since its release in the late 1970’s. For example, one way that Star Wars has had a big impact on its audience is the way in which it has changed the film industry as we know it. When the first film in the saga ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’ was released in 1977 it set the bar to which all future sci-fi films could only ever hope to reach, with rival franchises such as Star Trek and X-Men constantly being compared to Star Wars’ success. The original three Star Wars films are regarded as some of the best films ever made by many film critics and fans of the saga with special effects way ahead of its time and a captivating storyline which in-turn sky-rocketed the Star Wars franchise into stardom.

One of the biggest impacts that Star Wars has had on its audience was its ability to stick in the viewer’s mind indefinitely. Today, many adults in their 40’s and 50’s are big fans of Star Wars due to the fact that the original films would have come out when they were kids and have therefore stuck with them as they have transitioned from childhood into adulthood. This is something that very few sci-fi franchises have been able to achieve with mostly only one generation being a fans instead of multiple generations.

When it was announced in 2012 that there would be a new Star Wars trilogy being released in the following years, fans of the Saga found it difficult to contain the excitement and hype surrounding the announcement with multiple articles and hashtags trending on social media as a direct result of the announcement. It was then later revealed that the first film in the trilogy would be Star Wars: The Force Awakens which would be focusing on new characters and would be paving a new storyline in the Star Wars saga as opposed to solely focusing on the Skywalker bloodline which is what the original films and the prequels were based on. This therefore gave fans a lot to be excited about as they knew it would be the first time that Star Wars had ever explored beyond the Luke Skywalker era and were therefore very anxious to find out what happened after the events of the original three films. This amount of hype is something unique to the Star Wars saga as very few franchises in the film industry are able to create the same amount of buzz that Star Wars has in the late 20^th and 21^st century.

Star Wars has become such a big part of its audiences lives that not only does it have multiple events and conventions dedicated to it, but it also now has a religion. In 2001, the UK census was carried out as it normally is every 10 years however something particularly unusal cropped up in the 2001 census. When the public was asked to state their religion, 0.7% of the British public classed themselves as believers of Jedism thanks to an internet petition which encouraged people to state this as their religion in the 2001 census for a hoax. This is of course based off of the Jedi order as seen in the Star Wars saga, which just goes to show how much of an impact Star Wars has actually had on its audience.