The Appreciation is Strong with these Star Wars Characters

This research aims to investigate whether age could have an effect on character appreciation with characters from the Star Wars franchise. What makes the Star Wars franchise unique and interesting to utilize for this research in particular is the longevity of the franchise. In its 46 years of existence, several different generations of audiences have experienced the release of a new trilogy that consists of new films and the introduction of new characters. Interestingly, a trend that has developed throughout the franchise’s life is the criticism that comes whenever something new is released. Fans of the original trilogy did not enjoy the prequels and fans of the originals and the prequels did not enjoy the sequels (Reysen et al., 2023, p. 3). Research on audiences’ reception towards entertainment and characters in media has been vastly studied throughout the years (Cohen, 2001; Cohen et al., 2017; Reysen et al., 2023). But audience research in the context of the unique position Star Wars finds itself in, has not been done before. Therefore, the following research question was posed: To what extent does age have an effect on character appreciation with characters from the Star Wars film franchise? To answer this research question, a quantitative research approach was adopted. To build a theoretical framework, concepts like hedonic and eudaimonic entertainment and character appreciation have been analyzed and researched to create multiple hypotheses based on previously established literature and theories. A questionnaire was created on Qualtrics and distributed online to gather data (N = 2299) of Star Wars fans from different age groups. The gathered data was cleaned and the hypotheses were tested using the SPSS program by running multiple one-way ANOVA’s. Some hypotheses were proven to be right and could be accepted, while others had to be rejected. The main findings included that younger audiences enjoy hedonic characters more in comparison to older audiences. However, the assumption that older audiences enjoy eudaimonic characters more than younger audiences was not found in this research, which contrasted with previous research. Furthermore, audiences that have grown up with a particular trilogy do appreciate these characters more than others. However, this was not always the case in the results. Surprisingly, older generations also had more appreciation the newer characters in comparison to younger generations. In addition, younger generations had more appreciation for the older characters in comparison to older generations.