My main barometer here is the amount of bumper stickers and tee shirts seen. For Star Wars I see these kinds of things all the time.
But for Middle Earth, I see nada. Yeah, SW is in the middle of their current trilogy, while the final Hobbit film came out 5 years ago, sure. But even during the runs of the original ME trilogies I didn’t see much in the way of tees and such. I’d say I see more Harry Potter than ME stuff in point of fact…
But-in the 60’s JRRT was a real big thing, esp. among the counterculture.
I’d say both are a mixture. Keeping in mind that everyone can like anything, Episodes 1, 2, and 4 are juvenile while the others are more mature, and The Hobbit is juvenile while LotR is mature.
George Lucas kept the merchandising rights to Star Wars when he made that first movie. He merchandised the hell out of it, and it made him rich. Merchandising has always been a huge part of Star Wars.
I think that’s kind of like asking why Michael Jackson was more popular than Led Zeppelin. Tolkien is a lot more for a niche audience who is into medieval/British style imagery.
From the day George Lucas realized Star Wars was a hit merchandising has a been a heavy influence, if not the main driving force of the entire franchise. The Tolkiens on the other hand have strongly resisted any attempts to capitalize on the popularity of the books and mostly regretted the things they did allow.
I’m not sure that measuring ‘cultural cachet’ by bumper stickers and t-shirts is a little off. I believe LOTR has more general cultural references that aren’t just shirts/stickers that say ‘I am a fan of this property’. For example, Fantasy Role-Playing games (including computer versions) draw on LOTR a lot for their background, races, and storylines. While there have been a number of successful Star Wars games (including computer versions), it doesn’t have a huge influence on non-branded games the way that you have ‘Halflings’ and ‘Balors’ as direct rips and Tolkien style elves and dwarves in D&D and its derivatives and ‘inspired bys’. Similarly while Star Wars does have a few song references, I believe there are significantly more LOTR references in songs, they’re all over the place in 70s ‘stoner-approved bands’ like Led Zeppelin. Fantasy books also have large amounts of Tolkien homages, inspired-bys, and clones, while there really isn’t as much of that for Star Wars in science fiction.
Star Wars is a bigger property with stronger, centralized merchandising so it’s not surprising that you see direct references to it more, but LOTR seems to have broader and deeper cultural influence that doesn’t mention it by name.
I would argue that LotR had greater cultural significance than Star Wars, even if it hasn’t been merchandised as much. It pretty much popularized an entire new genre of literature, “fantasy”, which had previously been pretty much just fairy tales for kids and some obscure stuff, and is now a major industry, alongside mysteries, romance novels, science fiction, westerns (which arguable includes Star Wars), thrillers, etc.
Star wars was an extremely popular space opera, entertaining and well-done, but there were lots of space operas before it, and I don’t think it changed the genre in any important way.
I would fight the premise that Middle Earth didn’t have its day in the cultural sun. During the run of the LotR trilogy and even for a few years after, shirts with Elvish script were pretty common, replica swords and daggers were for sale in every mall kitsch store, and there were toys and board games released. And the movies themselves were a big darn deal, with tons of marketing tie-ins and huge DVD sales. For a while, I think the pop culture cachet of LotR WAS bigger than Star Wars, especially since Star Wars was in a slump following the prequels.
But…the LotR trilogy ended over fifteen years ago. And I think there were two major events that kinda killed off its pop culture presence. First, the Hobbit movies came out and were soundly mediocre. Watchable, but completely lacking the depth or charm of the LotR trilogy. Second, Game of Thrones released and became the new dominant fantasy property. Fantasy geeks didn’t want shirts with the Eye of Sauron anymore, they wanted shirts with Westeros house sigils.
There’s several reasons Star Wars has a bigger cachet. First off, it’s still a going concern, and it doesn’t have a closed canon – they can keep expanding the property with new canon characters and events. And even during its hiatus, there was still a lot of new content being created with things like novels and the animated TV shows. It’s also been effectively the only major game in town if you like space opera since its inception.
LotR was the “Star Wars” of the 60s and early 70s. It was very popular even when I was in college in the mid-80s, but it wasn’t nearly as accessible to the masses as Star Wars. You mostly had to read LotR, and the book is not easy reading. Star Wars was more visual, and therefore easier to digest on a large scale.
1 - LOTR is pretentious as fuck making it very inaccessible to casual fans
2 - Game of Thrones supplanted LOTR as the dominant swords and sorcery fantasy story
3 - Star Wars is closer to a comic book than a well written piece of literature which makes it more accessible to the casual fan
4 - Laser swords, force chokes and the ability to mind fuck people vs. a ring that the good guys don’t want to use (and nobody really seems to know how to use anyway)
Selling merchandise has been one of the central pillars of the Star Wars franchise. It’s a secondary priority in most franchises. So no surprise Star Wars sells more merchandise than Lord of the Rings or Star Trek or the MCU or Harry Potter.
That’s exactly the opposite of how I would’ve pegged it. But I prefer Star Wars because I find it more a juvenile fantasy. Never gave a shit or could give a shit about LOTR.
The Hobbitis juvenile fantasy, deliberately so. It was originally written for a younger audience. But I agree that Lords of the Rings on the other hand is more mature fantasy. The Silmarillion is elderly fantasy ;).
This. The Star Wars universe was created by a marketing genius. And the period of the original trilogy was just a prelude–the main merchandising began in the early 1990s. This many books. This many video games. This many comic book series (plus a daily newspaper strip that ran for years.) LotR, on the other hand, is almost entirely limited to the original books and the fairly recent movies. And until those movies, the books were pretty obscure. Remember the episode of Friends where they had to explain what the name “Gandolf” meant–then mock anyone who knew it? That was 1997.
I think it’s the closed canon that is the reason. With Star Wars, there’s been ebbs and flows in both the movies and the merchandising (do you remember much Star Wars stuff on the shelves in say… 1992? I don’t either.), but they’ve come out with ten movies in the universe, four of which have been since 2015, and several animated backstory series.
Contrast this with the output of a writer who died in 1973, and who only really wrote five books in the LOTR universe (Hobbit, the 3 LOTR books, and the Silmarillion). It’s seminal stuff and terrific, but very constrained and well known. I mean, they’re going to have to start digging for more obscure stuff like the Fall of Numenor, and flesh it out with a lot of non-Tolkien stuff if anyone wants to make movies from it.
Meanwhile, Star Wars is kind of a blank canvas where anything goes.