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My research involved two of my favorite things: movies and cars. Coming up with what I wanted to research was easy. The difficult part was figuring out how to how to create a research question that not only related those two things together, but also was actually researchable. Finding secondary research proved more difficult than I had anticipated. I started by looking back at when movies and cars started being made and it turns out, they were pretty close to each other. I also found out that the 1950’s was the best decade for cars. They had started to become really popular in America. During this time, cars actually influenced American pop culture, not the other way around, as my research question stated. To get more at what I was initially trying to find out, I knew I had to focus more on my primary research. I first thought about the Fast and Furious movies, as they are my favorite and obviously have some cars in them. I am part of a group on Facebook called “Chicagoland Petrolheads and Car Spotters” where people post pictures of cars the see around Chicago as well as talk about cars in general. Once in a while someone spots a certain car that everyone goes crazy over. Those cars are mainly the Nissan Skyline R34 and Toyota Supra. I couldn’t figure out why those cars were so popular. The Skyline I kind of understood because they are unavailable to buy in the US and technically illegal to import from Japan, but I didn’t understand the Supra. I thought about it for a while and remembered that Paul Walker’s character, Brian O’Connor, drives both of those cars in the Fast and Furious movies, the Skyline almost exclusively. The movies had to be part of the reason for the popularity of those cars and I based my survey questions off of this. I posted the survey

in the group because I figured out of 30,000 members, at least a couple of people had to own cars from one of the movies. Out of the people that answered, though, only a few did and even fewer were inspired by the movies to buy their car. With little results from that, I decided to focus on another one of my favorite movies franchises, Back to the Future. The car I would be focusing on is none other than the DeLorean, the choice of car for the famous time machine. Because there is only one car this time, it was easier to focus on whom I wanted to use for my primary research. In this case, I wanted to interview DeLorean owners but more specifically, those who bought their car because of the movies. I posted in the DeLorean Subreddit on Reddit.com that I was looking for people to interview and I ended up getting three DeLorean owners who agreed to answer a few questions I had. The results from he interview were much more conclusive this time. I learned a lot about each person’s experience with their car, why they bought it, as well as how people react to seeing it on the streets. It was clear that the DeLorean is a car people typically go crazy over. The final question of each interview was “What do you think BTTF did for the popularity of the DeLorean?” All three interviewees agreed that while older generations would still consider the car to be iconic without the movies, having the DeLorean star in the films made it more popular amongst the general population and younger generations who either were very young or weren’t alive when the movies came out. This was a huge help in exploring my research question and it made me consider the fact that the age of the audience makes a difference when looking at how movies have impacted the popularity of a car.