The Most Viral Star Wars Images
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the arguably most successful franchise introduced the world to a series of characters and cemented itself in pop culture history forever.
After nearly a decade, fans who thought the story had ended and that loose ends were tied, were told that the old gang would be striking back with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, set to hit theatres next week. Old faces are rumored to make a come back (looking at you, Admiral Ackbar and Nien Nunb) while new ones are sure to be introduced.
Instead of waiting impatiently, let’s celebrate some of the saga’s most iconic images.
Han Solo and Chewbacca
Comrades, co-pilots, besties. Whatever you want to call them, there’s no denying the star power these two bring and their return to the big screen together is one of the most anticipated parts of The Force Awakens. This image of Han Solo and Chewbacca has amassed nearly 14,000 hits according to WhereOnThe.Net and while that’s a lot, almost half of the hits come from Daily Mail alone.
A New Hope’s Most Famous Faces
This scene from the original 1977 Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope has some of the most famous faces to ever embody the roles with Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia and of course, Harrison Ford as Han Solo.
Since first appearing online, it’s been used on over 1,600 websites and on more than 10,000 uniques pages but popularity really peeked in 2014 when both The Telegraph and Digital Spy ran stories using the images.
Yoda
The tiny yet powerful Jedi Master has spread his infinite wisdom across nearly 1,000 websites. Dig a little deeper on WhereOnThe.Net and you see that Yoda makes over 100 appearances on sodahead.com alone as the Internet tries to answer burning questions like “would you rather have a wand or lightsaber?” or “who is your favorite green character from a movie?”
Luke, I am your…
Darth Vader has played a pivotal role in all Star Wars movies to date. This is news to no one. One of the most famous line in movie history was spoken through his iconic, polished, black mask.
He’s a complicated man, both a symbol for evil and redemption rolled into one, and has even been used as a baseline for Borderline Personality Disorder (seriously, you can read about that here). This image has graced the Internet over 9,200 times and 1,200 of those are on weirdworm.com. They’ve used a variation of the image in a series of Star Wars related articles like this here, here and here.
Frozen Han Solo
This image — while credited as one of the most iconic scenes — hasn’t had the traction online to show it. According to WhereOnThe.Net, this image has only graced 30 websites and makes for some very evenly dispersed graphs.
The Original Obi-Wan
While Ewan McGregor may have been the more recent face of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the fact that this image from the 1977 original appears over 4,400 times says Alec Guinness is the more iconic face of the two.
The image can be spotted in a long list of articles that mention Obi-Wan (and no particular movie) and on lists like Rolling Stone Magazine’s “30 Best ‘Star Wars’ Moments” and “50 Best ‘Star Wars’ Characters.”
Droid Drama
C-3PO and R2D2 were companions on screen and this particular image has had its fair share of usage across the web with roughly 2,700 hits. It’s been used often in stories announcing the reveal of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, causing one of the two spikes. The other? When news broke that the two actors who play the famous duo don’t actually like each other at all as told in The Telegraph, The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror.
The Bikini and the Beast
One of the original Rebel Alliance leaders, Princess Leia spawned a hair do that rivals “The Rachel” in popularity and (albeit forcibly) donned a bikini so famous it could be considered a secondary character. Seen here alongside Jabba the Hutt aka the gangster slug who held her captive, this has appeared on over 600 websites and more than 2,200 pages. The complexities of this image warrant a whole other discussion, head here to read for more on Ms Leia.
Got a favorite Star Wars image you’d like to learn more about? Find out where it is and where it’s been with WhereOnThe.Net.
WhereOnThe.Net traces how images spread online. Whether you want to find copies of your own work or track viral images, we crawl the Internet and show you all the sites it has appeared on and it’s growth over time.
Images used in this article are used subject to news reporting and quotation exemptions in German copyright law, but if you are the rightsholder and think it should be taken down, please let us know. For any questions, please email us at contact@whereonthe.net.
