The Myth of the Worthless Imperial Troops

In The Mandalorian there are multiple references to how worthless Stormtroopers are. Bill Burr’s character, Mayfeld, is a former Imperial sharp shooter. Mando isn’t impressed. He retorts “Hey, I wasn’t a Stormtrooper!” Later we see two scout troopers who literally cannot hit a rock 2 meters away from them. In the third episode of the second season (I’ll be vague to avoid spoilers) a character says that Stormtroopers “couldn’t hit the side of a bantha”.

As that episode progresses we see a handful of characters kill easily forty or more Stormtroopers directly. Granted, these characters are implied to be elite mercenaries, but still the message is clear: Stormtroopers are worthless cannon fodder and of no real threat to our heroes.

Has this always been the case?

I went through the original edit of Star Wars from 1977 to see how much carnage there really was.

The Boarding Party

The movie opens with a boarding party of Stormtroopers breaking into Leia’s ship. We see 9 Rebel soldiers killed and 2 Stormtroopers directly killed, though there is a third trooper laying by the door as Vader walks in.

After the battle some Stormtroopers stumble upon Leia. She kills one and the other shoots her.

Right off the bat these guys seem pretty dangerous.

Between now and the next battle with Stormtroopers we hear Obi-Wan say “these blast marks are too accurate for Sand People. Only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise.” The implication being either:

A. Sand People are even WORSE than Stormtroopers, but at least Storm Troopers can hit something once in a while.
B. Stormtroopers are actually pretty good.

The Falcon’s Escape from Mos Eisley

Han is standing outside The Millennium Falcon when Stormtroopers arrive to stop them. Han shoots two of the Stormtroopers, but they fail to do anything more than shoot the side of the ship a few times.

Still, Han seems pretty scared, like if he stays there he’s going to get killed. The implication is that these guys are pretty dangerous.

The Boarding Party

We don’t see this on screen, but it’s implied that Han, Luke, Chewbacca, and Obi-Wan ambush two Stormtroopers as they come on The Falcon so they can steal their uniforms.

The Prison Escape

While breaking out Princess Leia our heroes are backed into the cell block. We see for sure three Stormtroopers killed, and possibly a fourth. Again though, our characters seem scared and are looking for an escape route. They don’t just march forward and murder the Stormtroopers guarding the end of the hallway.

Getting to the Falcon

After escaping the trash compactor our heroes split up to head to the Falcon. Han shoots one Stormtrooper then chases after the group, once they are cornered they turn around, Han shoots one more, and then runs away. This is the only instance in this entire movie where the characters don’t take the threat of the Stormtroopers seriously, and it’s ultimately just Han bluffing.

Luke and Leia each shoot a Stormtrooper before swinging across the chasm.

The rest of the time is spent running away, because these guys are killers and they are afraid.

Obi-Wan’s Sacrifice (SPOILERS!!!)

After Obi-Wan sacrifices himself Luke goes into a rage and starts shooting at the Stormtroopers. He shoots three before fleeing… he flees because he’s afraid of them. They are a threat.

This marks the end of Stormtroopers in action.

So?

So how many did we see killed? 18 confirmed and 20 possible. This is across the entire 120 minute run time of the film. During that time we directly see them act quite competently, and see the aftermath of them wiping out a Jawa sand crawler and the Lars Homestead.

I should note that we do see some other Imperial soldiers killed, but these are just regular guys, not armored “elite” troopers.

I have yet to watch Empire with a clicker, but from memory the numbers are even smaller there. Two snow troopers get shot by the Falcon’s little turret thing. Chewbacca throws one off the balcony in the carbonite chamber. And maybe five more are killed as the heroes are escaping Cloud City.

Why do we think this then?

Jedi gets much harder to tally because there’s literally a war at the end of that movie. So keeping track of who is getting killed is much harder, but it’s from here that this idea of Stormtroopers being worthless starts. The Emperor says “an entire legion of my best troops” in reference to the soldiers defending the shield generator. We then see them taken out by little teddy bears.

However, I think this is just modern cynicism on our part. The Ewoks were meant to be pretty dangerous and quite savage. It’s no secret that the ground battle on the moon of Endor was meant to be an analogy of how primitive Viet Cong guerilla tactics defeated the technologically superior United States military. Without going into detail about how woefully misinformed and misguided this idea is; that’s what Lucas was going for. I mean, shit, the Ewoks clearly are cool with eating humans. They were ready to eat Han and Luke and then we see them playing trooper helmets at the end as drums… we have to assume they ate the heads that were in those helmets.

Jokes aside, the villains not being able to hit heroes is par for the course in adventure stories. The Iliad isn’t the story of how five minutes into a battle Achilles is hit by an arrow and sidelined for a month or Hector gets his hand chopped off on day 1 and sits out the rest of the war. They’re heroes. They survive until it’s their time to get hurt. However there has to be the illusion of tension throughout. The characters have to be afraid of their enemies. The enemies have to be shown to be dangerous and deadly. The original Star Wars trilogy did this. It did it quite excellently. But as time moved on we got more cynical.

This cynicism by “fans” bled into future Star Wars media. The video games became all about massacring hundreds of enemy troops and shooting down thousands of TIE Fighters. And so comics and books reflected this same thinking. When it came time for the prequels Lucas explicitly created an enemy that was (and these are his words) “…quite worthless. The Jedi cut through them like butter.” To quote Mr. Plinkett “F**K YOU, THAT’S LAME!” The whole “war” in the prequels is being fought by two giant, worthless, disposable armies. The whole story had about as much tension as the gas compartments on the Hindenburg… after it burned up and crashed.

When you watched the original Star Wars movies you may not have been keeping score, but your brain recognized the threat. You may not have really worried Luke was going to get shot through the forehead, but the danger was presented in such a way that you felt that was a possibility. Sadly after four decades of cynicism and two decades of tensionless Star Wars action you almost have to go back with a pen and paper to analyze those films and recognize that, actually, the villains weren’t quite the cannon fodder we’ve made them out to be.