Have you ever thought to yourself, I wonder exactly how many lives were lost in the original Star Wars trilogy? Well, I have some great news for you. Instead of spending a ton of time analyzing every frame of the three films and doing tireless research about ship capacity and planet population sizes, you can just watch the short three minute video below! Be warned: you may end up being pretty shocked by the final tally.
Being made primarily for kids, it's a bit hard to categorize the Star Wars films as being very "violent." Sure, there's a good amount of gun play, space battles and explosions in the original trilogy, but the only actual blood we ever see is on the floor of the Mos Isley Cantina after Obi-wan cuts an alien's arm off. As this new video from Digg shows us, however, there is actually kind of a lot of killing and death going on, as the final death toll for Episodes IV, V and VI is a rather staggering 2,005,645,868.
It should be noted that the definition of "on-screen death" is a bit skewed here, as you don't exactly see all of the Imperial soldiers die in the Death Star explosions, and audiences don't witness the Alderaanians cry out in terror and then be suddenly silenced. That being said, the editor's intent is still pretty clear, and the result is definitely neat (though I do wish they had chosen a better/more appropriate song). It's pretty clear that the people who made this video did their proper research, but I am left with one question: do droids not get any consideration here? They aren't "alive" in the strictest sense, but within the Star Wars universe they do display emotion and personality. If a Tauntaun's death counts towards the final total, shouldn't the death of every R2 unit in an X-Wing count as well? I'm sure there is some debate to be had on this subject.
To get back to my original point, it is interesting that Star Wars finds a way to blind the audience from all of the death in the original trilogy. Whenever a faceless Stormtrooper gets hits with a laser from a blaster rifle and hits the ground motionless, most of us aren't thinking about our heroes killing a bunch of people, but instead just about them making it back to the Millennium Falcon safe and sound. The same can be said for space battles, as just seeing spaceships crash from far away really does its part to help audiences forget about all the people on the inside of those ships.
I imagine this video will soon/eventually be followed by an on-screen death analysis of the prequel trilogy - though I imagine that the death totals there are going to be far, far less. We'll be keeping an eye out for it, so stay tuned.
