A Star Wars Day experiment

I know I'm mixing franchises here, but the recent coverage of Star Wars Day has left me with something of a Twilight Zone feeling. It's almost like waking up in a world where people have always celebrated an unofficial holiday commemorating some pretty good, if dated science fiction films of the Seventies and Eighties.

So I did some data collection, doing some Google searches (Web and News) over different custom time ranges and I found that, though the origins of the holiday date back to the late Seventies, the vast majority of the coverage seems to have started about the time Disney recently started seriously promoting the upcoming sequel. 

Try your own data gathering at home. You may get slightly different results but I think you'll find an exceptionally large jump this year. Wikipedia says "Observance of the holiday spread quickly due to Internet, social media, and grassroots celebrations," and I'm sure that interest in the upcoming film accelerated the process, but I have trouble believing that these factors alone could drive the increase we've seen. It's almost like major media conglomerates like Disney had some mysterious force that could cause journalists to promote their product.