New Star Wars animated show "Rebels" coming fall 2014

Yeah I suppose if the Stormtrooper ranks were still made up mostly of clones, Lucas would have had someone in the OT at least make a passing mention of that. Since it seems like such a cool bit of info to include. And since reference was already made to the Clone Wars in ANH.

 

But at the time, he didn't know what the Clone Wars were. Contrary to what he likes to claim, he didn't have the whole thing worked out in advance. So at the time the OT came out, I doubt he or his cowriters had any idea that he'd eventually establish that the namesake clones had been the forerunners of Imperial Stormtroopers.

Before the prequels came out, I always kinda figured the Clone Wars were wars fought over the issue of cloning (like the US Civil War was fought over slavery, say), or wars fought against a cloned enemy, or something. I don't think the possibility that the clones were fighting on the same side as the Jedi ever occurred to me.

 

Sure there's certainly no shortage of warm bodies, but they don't strike me as a conscript army. I mean sure, those are indeed notoriously unreliable, but also notoriously disloyal. I doubt that's something a Sith Lord would tolerate.

Besides, I'm only talking about the Stormtroopers and probably the tie pilots here and then probably *only* the bulk of them. Clearly the officer corps aren't clones, neither is seems are the gunners the techs and the like. Still plenty of room for non-clone elite troops, commandos, assassin death squads and other specialists recruited and trained from the citizenry.

The way I see it, Stormtroopers are like tie fighters. Lightly armed, poorly protected but fast and there's a seemingly unending swarms of them. Conscript armies don't have that degree of fanatical loyalty and professional soldiers take too much time and resources to waste so recklessly. Clones on the other hand are relatively cheep and quick to replace. Plus as an added bonus you only have to buy one size of trooper armour.

Anyway, if I'm remembering it right and Lucas did say they're clones then it's all academic.

 

That's why I led with the part about absolute power corrupting. Clearly, based on ROTJ, the Emperor became overconfident, and that's so whatever the makeup of the stormtroopers was.

 

I concur with this sentiment. Lucas is so simple-minded as a writer that he handles things too literally (hence midichlorians).

 

That is not at all my sentiment, so you do not concur with me in the least. I wasn't saying that what Lucas ultimately decided about the Clone Wars was wrong, just that he probably didn't come up with it until after the original trilogy, and that what he finally did come up with was a possibility that never occurred to me. If anything, that's a compliment; it's good to do the unexpected. Having the mass-produced clone army be on the good guys side, as part of a Machiavellian master plan by a villain who was orchestrating both sides of the war to gain power for himself, was actually quite imaginative. The prequels had plenty of problems, but the core storyline of Palpatine's rise was actually pretty effective.

And midi-chlorians were a fantastic idea, and not simple-minded at all. They were clearly meant as an analogy with mitochondria, the symbiotic organelles within our cells that provide our bodies with energy. It's very imaginative to merge that idea with something more spiritual, to posit symbiotic organelles that provide living beings with their connection to the cosmic energy field of the Force. It's the kind of Eastern thinking that Lucas has always embraced in SW, the equivalency of the physical and the spiritual, in contrast to our Western tendency to treat them as fundamentally separate. Most of the stuff in Star Wars is just pastiche and homage to earlier movies and serials and comics and so forth; I think that the merger of spirituality and cellular biology may be the one genuinely original idea George Lucas has ever had.

 

From the 1977 film, I'd assumed that the Clone Wars were going to be wars fought with clones, where both sides had used them. The idea of Boba Fett wearing "Imperial shock-trooper" armor was floating around in fan circles soon after the character was revealed in the late 1970s. What was a complete and utter surprise for me until Attack of the Clones was the fusing of more or less all those ideas together and making the Fett-like clone army the immediate precursor to the stormtroopers we knew from the OT. I thought that was utterly brilliant. I squeed when I first saw the clone trooper helmet.

 

To my knowledge, the first mention that Stormtroopers were clones was the 4th issue of "Star Wars Official Poster Monthly" from the 1977/78 timeframe:

"Soldiers of the Empire!" Article Scan

Whether this information was made up by the writer, or gleaned from George Lucas, who knows - but it was pretty much out there from the beginning.

 

Thanks, man. I have a vague recollection of seeing that, but that wasn't something I ever personally owned.

 

That's a pretty cool image. To the best of my knowledge I've never seen that before. It's possible that George Lucas had decided post-May of 1977 that the Stormtroopers in the original film were created through cloning technology to tie their existence to the aforementioned Clone Wars, but seeing as the concept wasn't exactly common knowledge for a couple of decades he must not have considered it a very important detail to bother trying to explain in any of the original films.

 

If the rumors about Episode VII are true and

Spoiler: Episode VII

John Boyega is playing a storm trooper,

that might answer the "are OT storm troopers clones?" question.

 

You know now that I think about it, while there's no direct reference in the OT that says that Stormtroopers are clones, when viewed in the context of the prequel trilogy there's no reason *not* to presume that they're still clones when they burst into the Tantive IV.

Indeed, there's even some circumstantial evidence to support the presumption. Most notably, numbers instead of names (eg TK-421.) This could be a military designation thing, but then we saw a number of (obviously not clone) officers addressed with proper names (Jejerrod, Oswalt, Piett, etc.) Then there's Leia's comment "aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?" Again, totally circumstantial but it supports the idea.

Indeed, wasn't the original idea behind Boba Fett that he was a left-over clone from the Clone Wars? Hence his armour originally intended to be black and while like a Stormtrooper's? Lucas does have a habit of keeping pretty fundamental concepts to himself if they're not directly to do with the film's plot. I mean just look at the Mortis episodes. He had that whole background mythos knocking around in his head the entire time and never brought it up until he decided to do it in TCW.

I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure that both the idea that the Stormtroopers were recruits instead of clones and the the clones were the Republic's antagonists during the Clone Wars originated from assumptions made by EU authors. Lucas just never bothered to correct them since he apparently didn't care all that much.

 

Interesting. The article is credited to Anthony Fredrickson, who's probably this guy who worked on multiple Star Trek series and films. He and Doug Drexler worked together at the Federation Trading Post memorabilia store in the '70s and worked together on fan references like the Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual. He's never been associated with Lucasfilm, though.

Also note the introductory text under the article title: "STAR WARS invites speculation. The richness of this artificially created universe is the result of an intense curiosity it arouses in its audience but never satisfies." That seems to be stating outright that the article is merely Fredrickson's own conjecture, a fan extrapolation like the Medical Reference Manual. Maybe he recalled the reference to the Clone Wars and made a lucky guess that the clones in question were the ancestors of the Stormtroopers.

Or maybe that was just more obvious than I ever realized...

 

It seems that some of the Stormtroopers were initially clones ...

http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Imperial-stormtrooper

But during the Star Wars Rebels era, they aren't.

http://jediinsider.com/news.php?itemid=14881

 

There's nothing simple-minded about midichlorians, nor are they somehow too literal. We already knew that high innate Force strength ran in a particular genetic bloodline back in the OT days. That was in 1983. Midichlorians are the details. They add complexity to a situation which was popularly believed to be the case by virtue of the comparatively simple-minded "just because". But in reality things don't work "just because"; they work for a reason. Midichlorians are what you find when you look under the hood.

How do we know this? Has he said as much in an interview?

 

Star Wars is fantasy - 'just because' is fine because it describes no real physical processes that we know of and can't exist - midichlorians add nothing from a story telling point of view.

 

In a seldom-read prequel to "Goldilocks & the Three Bears," it's revealed that Baby Bear's porridge is "not too hot, not too cold, but just right" not by simple happenstance, but due to his burgeoning experimentations in Molecualr Gastronomy.

Can one really say that the revelation of Baby Bear being a Foodie adds nothing from a story-telling point of view?

 

I don't know about that. Maybe the movies didn't make use of them beyond TPM, but that doesn't mean they couldn't potentially be useful in other stories. I mean, most fantasy fiction treats mystical phenomena as vague and unknowable things. The idea that sensitivity to the mystical energies of the universe is something that can be codified and measured takes it in a more science-fictional direction, and that could permit story ideas that the vaguer spiritualism of the OT would not have allowed.

For instance, imagine how hard it would be to keep potential Jedi alive if the Empire could test for midichlorian counts. Really, since the Jedi Council had the ability to test for them, I have to wonder why Palpatine didn't institute an Empire-wide testing program -- disguised as a routine medical exam, say -- to weed out every potential new Jedi and have them killed, or taken and trained as Sith candidates. Such a program could conceivably have identified Luke and Leia as Force-sensitives in their childhood and kept them from ever growing to adulthood. Well, although maybe Leia would've been protected by royal immunity, and Luke by remoteness -- perhaps the testing hadn't yet reached as far as Tatooine. Or maybe there could be a Rebels episode dealing with such a testing system and the effort to keep it from being deployed.

See, I've been thinking about this for two minutes and I've already gotten several story ideas out of it. So it's not true that it adds nothing from a storytelling point of view. Any new insight or information about the universe adds something from a storytelling point of view, even if the canon doesn't choose to pick up on those story possibilities. But then, that's what spinoffs and tie-ins are for.

 

The movies did make use of them in ROTS, in setting up Anakin's "seduction". ( Also, though not a film, they were used in the final episodes of TCW. )

It's also a suggestion of a form of collective consciousness and serves to promote the film's theme of symbiosis.

"If you study microbiology, you will come to the realization that this alien life-form, which has a completely different DNA, helped create life on earth and within the galaxy. But every cell has one of these life-forms in it. It's a simplified version of relationships - that symbiotic being goes through everything. That's why Han Solo joins the Rebellion, that's why Luke saves his father. In Star Wars land, all these relationships are necessary to bring forth a greater good - and evil."

 

The midichlorians were briefly mentioned by Chancellor Palpatine in the Galactic Opera House sequence in Episode III, but as part of the story about Darth Plagueis creating life by manipulating them. They did get a mention in the live-action films outside of Episode I, however fleeting. Unless there was another midichlorian comment uttered by another character that escapes my memory.