Is Star Wars Day In Shreveport As Big As The Rest Of The US?
Star Wars Day falls on the perfect date every year, in fact, the date is the reason why it's Star Wars Day. See, it's not the day the first Star Wars movie hit theatres, that's May 25th. It's not Star Wars creator George Lucas' birthday, that's May 14th...but it is odd that these are all lining up to be in May.
No, Star Wars Day falls on May The Fourth. Simply because of the joke/pun "May The Fourth Be With You", a play on the classic Star Wars quote "May The Force be with you. The pun had been around for decades, but attaching a "Star Wars Day" holiday idea to it didn't really gain traction until 2011.
In 2011, the first recorded mass celebration of Star Wars Day took place in Toronto, where the Toronto Underground Cinema through a party with cosplay, trivia, parodies, and more. Since then, the day has morphed into a worldwide celebration.
It's also brought big business to an already insanely profitable franchise.
The team at the data analytics website Pattern ran the numbers on Star Wars Day, and found that it is the most profitable single day of the year (minus the holiday season) for Star Wars. Here’s more of the specifics on what they found:
- Star Wars Day (May the 4th) drove a 11% increase in demand for Star Wars products on Amazon over the average the rest of the year—the largest single-day increase outside of the holiday shopping season.
- No Star Wars product sees a larger single-day lift than Star Wars Legos (up 80%) —higher than any day of 2021 besides the last Sunday before Christmas.
- Products relating to Baby Yoda, the Mandalorian, and Boba Fett experienced the most demand in 2021.
By the way, the demand for Baby Yoda products over all other characters wasn't even close. Baby Yoda (or Grogu if you're nasty) had about 5 times the demand of the next closest character, which was The Mandalorian (or Din Djarin). Yoda was third, then Boba Fett, Darth Vader, Cara Dune, and Kylo Ren.
Names you won't find in the Top 20 for demand are Rey, Poe, Finn, or C-3PO. But you will find some interesting names in the Top 20, including General Grievous, Commander Cody, Count Dooku, and BB-8. Others making the list are Ashoka Tano, Jabba The Hutt, Jango Fett, and Chewbacca.
So do we think Star Wars Day will be big this year in Shreveport? Absolutely!
Star Wars fans in Shreveport are crazy. Over the last few years, Shreveport's comic con, Geek'd Con, has been bringing in big Star Wars names. All the way back to the first year of the event, when the late legend Peter Mayhew came to Shreveport. The massive amount of Chewbacca fans came out to welcome him that year.
In the years after that, Geek'd Con has welcomed Star Wars stars Matthew Wood and David Acord, and now this year Clint Howard will be coming to the event. Clint Howard played Ralakili in Solo: A Star Wars Story.
Every year at Geek'd Con, there are tons of Star Wars cosplays that fans create and wear out to the show. In addition, you can catch a massive amount of lightsabers and other Star Wars merch getting purchased at the show.
With all of this evidence, I feel very comfortable saying that Star Wars Day will be a big holiday in Shreveport!