STAR WARS Ranking Based on Competitive Picking

Nailed it.

And Hamill has mentioned that he's glad they didn't have the internet when ESB came out.

I've met a few older fans (I'm 41, so I mean folks in their 60's+) who really don't like ESB because it changed the narrative from being about how anyone, even a nobody from nowhere, can better theirself and stand up to tyrrany to one about magical royal blood and specialness.

Now...where have we heard that before?

One of the fun social experiment things about this saga is that because its stories are cyclical, and it took generations to come out with each addition, if you have the time for history, or a good memory, we get to see the same social behaviors being cyclical as well.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

The first time I heard this I was in my young 20's hitching a ride and the old guy brought it up.

And if we stop and think about where America was in 1977, what was going on, what had happened over the past 20 years, what memes (proper use of the term) were socially circling around...

Vietnam, government corruption, journalism taking on the government (which was a huge thing), the dying of Americana, a redefinition of "family" to be more what you find than what you inherit, cities falling apart to ruin, the rise of the military commercial industry as a distrusted evil, general dystopianism, elitism, a widening gap between the rich and poor, urbanization, a rotting ruralism (which itself, ruralism was part of Americana ... seriously 4H Club used to be huge), a shifting from collectivism to individualism, a battle of balancing technology and spirituality, and a lacking of a positive common social identity (negative common social identity, sure, but what everyone stood for rather than against...not so much)...

Star Wars 1977 hit all of this without directly saying any of it.

And if you're from this moment in time and walk in to Star Wars, and only Star Wars, on May 25th, what do you see?

You don't see a magical saga.
You see, basically, Midnight Cowboy in space against a backdrop of basically Midway with an insert of The Great Escape all wrapped up in Flash Gordon trimmings on steroids.

And that Midnight Cowboy tangent is the part we don't readily notice today.

We see "the heroe's journey", but back then what we think of as the "heroes journey" was just a really common 'country boy/girl in the big city' story. And those were really common at the time as many folks could relate to some degree with them as the US urbanized.
Lucas may have meant to make a Heroe's Journey (who knows!), but what the audience would have understood the image as of a naive country boy from a dying, desolate, and dried up farmland region running off to the bright lights of a corrupt and fast paced bigger world filled with danger and evil while fighting to hold on to those core rural "noble" values which ultimately become the key to him overthrowing the power of tyranny is...well...basically Midnight Cowboy.

That identity was completely blown to pieces with ESB.

It's hard to do, but ANH reads very different if you can fool yourself into forgetting the rest of the films exist.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

It's an item tree analysis (ITA) employing a variation of lexicographic preference theory in a rather clever way.

I doubt you'll find polls using those rather technical terms though. Most polls don't talk about their technicals on the front side (unless you're shopping for a polling engine perhaps).

But yes, they are running a complex lexicographic logic on the back end.

You could build an ITA on survey monkey that functions basically this way using sound ITA methods to design good clarification and competition in the questions (comparisons), but the inferrence on the answers is where the real gold is, and that's the lexicographic preference theory bit and I can't point out someone that does it open ended such that you can build a poll of any kind and it would build the competitive output based on the test results.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Jesus... @Lock_S_Foils
You opened a can of worms here.
I started trying to research the site, company, registrant, anything to make contact to read a white paper on their methods or ... anything, and holy cow. It's like the black ops of a site.

There's no visible registrant, and it's locked down beyond almost anything I've ever seen - even the secondary layers are redacted. The only thing I got was Canada for nation of registrant. Which means nothing.

Searching for the company yields nothing.

There's zero on the site itself.

It's really bizarre. Like...why?
Kind of makes me wonder if they are training their algorithm that they will then turn around and sell as a comercial service and so they've locked down everything from visibility to protect their ip and identity?

One thing is certain. Their slogan at the bottom "It's Science!" is wrong.

This isn't anything like science. If it were science, we would have everything we want to know about who is involved and how it works. This is commercial analytics.

Weird.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Yep. "ROTJ in the USA!" as one might sing to a certain song.

I was so young seeing that, that I only somewhat can see it in my mind anymore.
Indy & The Ark sticks out more, but mostly I can't see that film in my mind at that moment either, just the ride home after the movie was over. I recall it because it was when I realized what a movie was, and that the characters were real people pretending because Indy was Han and that had totally blown my mind away (for those scratching your heads on the conflict of dates here, I was a military brat and the theater on post regularly played old popular releases as well as new releases so in this way I happened to see ROTJ and Indy & The Ark in the same year...also...new releases were always late because we lived in Kodiak...in the 80's...soooo yeah - months late to a year late was normal...let's just say as a kid, there was a movie place, it played movies, and I had no idea why it played what it did...I just thought they all played movies this way when I was a kid).

Cheers,
Jayson

--- Double Post Merged, Jul 20, 2020, Original Post Date: Jul 20, 2020 ---

You're welcome, and while we're taking a moment I'd like to thank everyone who has participated because it really would not have been possible without you.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

Hey, come to think of it...you might have been there first hand during that first critical shift from ANH to ESB, right smack in the middle of your teens.
Do you have any recall of the view of ANH before and after ESB?

I've heard recall from others than ANH was viewed one way prior to ESB, and then there was a bit of a knee jerk with ESB that disrupted the view of what Star Wars was about (at least to some number of people).

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Jayson