Data Analytics is the art and science of studying large, often complex sets of data and answering important questions. How do we best use our resources to win this election? Why doesn’t our company make any money in Florida? What factors contribute to the high readmission rates of heart failure patients within 30 days of discharge?
Through the use of statistics, computer science, and machine learning, combined with a keen sense of design for visualization, we can attempt to answer the most important questions.
Who is the best PAW Patrol pup?
This might seem like a question with a highly subjective, opinionated answer. But through data, we can make a pretty good argument—at a minimum—for why it isn’t Zuma.
The PAW Patrol have been single handedly saving the world since 2013, though strangely, there doesn’t seem to be a rush by Nickelodeon or the internet to make an archive of the scripts for all 400+ episodes. The good news is that thanks to some presumably die-hard citizens of Adventure Bay (and the Fandom website), we can find the scripts to 247 episodes that include dialogue for 215 characters including favorites like “Mama Dragon” and “The Train Engineer.”
In the almost 3,000 times during the first 5 seasons of PAW Patrol that Ryder calls to one of his pups, he seems to have some favorites. As you might guess, Chase is the go-to pup for Ryder. Maybe he’s the most effective employee as some sort of pseudo-police dog with a murky-at-best authority to arrest ne’er do wells and criminals. As one fifth of the full-time PAW Patrol pups (this data set is pre-Liberty), he commands almost 25% of Ryder’s attention. And if you’re thinking that means another pup is severely neglected, you’d probably be right. Poor Zuma is called on only one out of ten times which, honestly, is a little shocking as his “job” is related to water rescue and Adventure Bay is, well, a city on a bay.
Rubble got his own spin-off, so don’t feel bad for this pup whose job is construction-related (not to be confused with Barney Rubble who was a TV Repossessor/Geological Engineer).
Marshall is worth mentioning, as the fire-fighting Dalmatian, especially when you dig into how much these pups actually get to talk.
Woofing Words
When it comes to the PAW Patrol, none of the pups are particularly loquacious and most dialogue tends to be only a sentence or two in length. In all fairness, a long soliloquy would be out of character for a cockapoo.
It’s not shocking from what we’ve learned so far to see that Zuma is on the far right of this chart with the least amount of dialogue (but perhaps compensating just a tad with some slightly lengthier speech). But Marshall has more talking time than any other pup beating out Chase who seems to have much more favor from Ryder.
What could Marshall possibly be talking about? Removing some common stop words (in Natural Language Processing, NLP, this refers to words like [a, it, the]), we can get a pretty good image of both each pup’s personality and their job in the PAW Patrol.
We find out that the fire-pup Marshall’s most most frequently used word isn’t fire or rescue-related. It’s Whoa. Whoa. In fact, Huh, beats out ladder and water which are things that one would have thought he references a lot.
Chase’s fifth most used word is Chase. His own name.
Zuma appears to be the coolest dogg, dude.
And Chickaletta, the Mayor’s adventurous pet chicken, sometimes herself barks. And belches.
BONUS: The Mighty Movie
The newest award-winning, 2023 action film, Paw PATROL: The Mighty Movie has a clear Skye-centric story line. But just how much time does the film focus on her? The answer is a lot.
Going simply by mentions of her name, it’s clear it’s a movie revolving around her.
But on the big screen, the number of mentions don’t necessarily equate to more importance. As we’ve seen earlier, Marshall has more speaking lines than the rest of the pups in the TV series, but hardly can be considered THE pup of Adventure Bay. However, when we look at how much screen time Skye gets in the film, it’s pretty obvious that she is really the star.
Skye gets 4x the amount of screen time than Chase or Marshall. Liberty, not included in the data set above, probably gets more than those two, but she’s not even Mighty in most of the movie so that’s a disqualifier.
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