Is the movie implying that the regular storm troopers in the original trilogy are actually clones? Did I miss this part? Man, I hate watching a movies with other people at my house. All the goings-on makes it difficult to hear everything the characters say exactly.

STORMTROOPERS ARE NOT CLONES!

I refuse to believe it!

From what I've understood, there are both clones as well as enlisted soldiers in the Imperial army after the Clone Wars.

Or actually, that's what would make most sense to me at the moment.

Okay, I'll believe that.

...grudgingly

Well actually, yes, the stormtroopers are clones. The emperor makes them turn on the Jedi. By the time of the New Empire, soldiers can also enlist for the army. But stormtroopers originally started out with clones. Lucas explains this several times, in both the AotC and the RotS Audio commentary. Remember in 'A New Hope', when you see the stormtroopers bumping their helmets in the doorway? They made Jango bump his helmet when boarding the Slave 1 after fighting Obiwan. In the audio commentary, Lucas explains that this is a little inside joke. As if Jango always bumped his head, and this trait got cloned into the stormtroopers somehow.

Yes, this is the case
link

I heart wiki.

Also, I find it funny how the clones suddenly lost all ability to shoot a straight shot after ep. 3

They just got too old and needed glasses.

Eh. When people see stormtroopers repeatedly miss everybody in the Star Wars movies, I think they're forgetting a few things about the main characters:

Luke Skywalker: Possibly as strong in the Force as Darth Vader. Yeah. The guy who, as an infant, accidentally piloted a starfighter and blew up a starship.
Leia Organa: Same, she just doesn't know about it.
Han Solo: ex-Imperial Officer.
Chewbacca: War veteran.
Lando: Successful smuggler and gambler.

All of the above people either have an immense amount of experience killing stormies prior to the movies, or they have magical powers.....
And just for completeness:

R2-D2: Small, unimportant target. Note that the stormtroopers hit him when he became an important target (see RotJ)
C-3PO: Large, slow-moving and unimportant target.

Stormtroopers do a nice job of slaughtering rebel troops in ESB. Their shots also are quite accurate, especially given the accuracy of the typical blaster carbine. If you watch ANH again, you see that Luke and Leia have about as much luck aiming them as the stormtroopers.

What about where Luke destorys the blast door control panel right before the Falcon leaves the Death Star? :p He has to shoot a farther and smaller target than the stormies do. :p

Exactly.

One indication that the stormies in ANH are not all clones is that Lucas changed Boba Fett's voice for the DVD-release, but not the voices of the stormtroopers.

[QUOTE=The Mega-ZZTer]What about where Luke destroys the blast door control panel right before the Falcon leaves the Death Star? :p He has to shoot a farther and smaller target than the stormies do. :p[/QUOTE]

Two words:
Force-sensitive

As for accuracy problems, everyone knows the E-11 isn't that great

Holy crap! I gotta see that in AotC.

Actually, that was a stupid thing for Lucas to "explain" back then because now the old guy says that Stormtroopers are "clones" but not the Jango clones, rather clones of various Imperial Officers and supposedly their dumb cousins that they put in a word for. Hence them not shooting accurately.

The Jango clones have advanced aging and they don't have fresh source material for more, so by ANH all those clones would be useless. Considering most of them were likely killed in the clone wars, the leftovers would be around 40-60+ at the time of ANH. Even for Clones, I think that would be a bit old.

Personally, I'm fond to thinking the Empire massacred the rest of the Clones or made them elite guards like the Royal Guards and just had the Imperial military force people into recruiting by fear and such as the Nazis and other armies have done. Their horrible aim I account to cheap uniforms that unlike the Clones, are more for visual intimidation than actually fighting.

I would have gone with "no clones" because it's quite obvious that the Empire has a huge officer turnover. And the officers aren't identical. So there must be promotion... although with some of their actions, picking up x residents of Mos Eisley or Coruscant or what have you and giving them shiny hats would be an upgrade.

well you're wrong because thats not how the writer of the story sees it and wrote it



The expanded universe sees them as recruits and clones which is wrong because if you look at george lucas, they are clearly clones. and if you look at the game battle front 2, it mentions (as in other books about ep3 recently released say) that there were just more models to clone from


^this was even entered in the SW.com databank and it never mentions recruits (maybe in the EU but that isn't cannon)

The thing mentioning storm troopers as recruits is probably written before ep2-ep3 therefore just contradicted once lucas wrote the rest of star wars.

just like the emperor having clones and escaping his body magicly wouldn't make sense for lucas story because you cant maintain your identity after you die if you're a sith (read the original ep3 script for that)

so volia, EU writers just make up stuff and isnt actually part of the Star Wars story (unless it doesnt contradict it, then its just up to the reader)

He doesn't even know how he sees it as he's constantly changing his mind on things.

Am I that naive to not know that Han Solo was an ex-imperial officer?
Did I actually miss that in the last 15 years of my star wars fanhood?

Damn...

(I'm 20 btw, not 15, just been a fan since I was 5 or so)

well the story is complete and thats how he wrote it

Ladies and gentelman, we have a winner.

Interesting that you dismiss the expanded universe, but cite a video game as a reliable source of information.

I like to believe that stormtroopers are a mix of leftover clones and real people.

I was saying that when the EU contradicts the films then its not relevant as part of the story.

and some books released by lucasarts about ep3 when it came out (visual guide i believe is the one im thinking of) talks about them being made from other models.

I dont dismiss all of the EU, but its not cannon because george lucas didn't write it and all of what he has said about the storm troopers leads one to believe that they are clones, all other sources about recruits and such come from other writers, not GL

GL may not have written it, but he stills endorses it. He even wrote the forward to one of the EU novels (Splinter of the Mind's Eye) and a lot of EU elements made it into the prequels, including Coruscant and the Juggernauts (predecessor to the AT-ATs in Ep 3).

but he still did explain the storm troopers in his commentary

Where did this come from?

That EU book series.

Han Solo trilogy, ja?

And there's a Stromtrooper Academy on Carida (before Kyp blew the **** out of the system's sun), so unless you completely dismiss EU there are recruits as well.

Stormtroopers were not originally clones, but stupid George Lucas decided during the development of the prequels that they should be clones, and thus he tried to rewrite the movies. Again and again. Trying to explain this away and pointing to web sites and commentary recording during the prequel trilogy does not change the fact that GL originally intended for them not to be clones.

GL lost all genius at some point between the end of ESB and the first time the ewoks showed up in RotJ.

Frankly, maintaining a clone army would be hard to do given the expense. It worked to generate an army out of no where, but going forward, it would have to be maintained with regular old people.

Here's my take on it.

Stormtroopers began as clones, in everything from AotC up until a few years after RotS.

As mentioned before, clones age twice as fast; this so so that the Republic could have soldiers at their prime age (20), while only needing to grow and train them for ten years.

Sometime between AotC and RotS, Kamino was attacked, and the prime clone (an exact genetic duplicate of Jango) was killed, leaving the Kaminoians with nothing to clone from (so it can be assumed that they stopped producing jango clones on kamino at that time, destroying the possibility of "younger" clones). The youngest generation was biologically about 10 years old (5 years real-time).

That's all canonical. Now, my theory;

After RotS, most clones would have reached an age of around 20-30 years in biological age. By the time of ANH, that would be 50-60, which is for all intents and purposes too old to fight effectively.

Before even ANH, the Empire controls practically every system out to the Mid Rim, and some beyond, of loyal citizens eager to support the new order. (Remember, the Empire had a lot of popular support among the lesser informed, and since the Empire controlled the holonet, the "lesser informed" was just about everyone.)

Cloning is expensive. Recruiting is not. Training and growing a cloned soldier takes 10 years. Recruiting and training civilians would take 1-2 years, if that. The Empire has only a handful of cloning facilities, but thousands of inhabited starsystems. And the Empire was infamous for going with quantity over quality (TIE fighters are a good example).

Why would the Empire spend all that time and money on growing another clone army, when they could recruit twice as many soldiers for half the cost and half the time?

I'd just like to point out that even if all the soldiers are recruits by ANH (which is easy to accept, see above posts by others), the Empire likely still used the clones as a standard to measure all other stormtroopers, particularly physical standards. Remember in ANH that Leia notes that Luke is a little short for a stormtrooper (before Luke reveals who he is as he breaks Leia out). This mostly would suggest to me that the Empire at least favored those that fit the "ideal."

</2 cents>

You could engineer total loyalty and improved skills no?

Spot on, Read Hard Contact by Karen Traviss and it'll go into the whole clone idea better

I think everyone concurs with that.

I think the stormtroopers are all ZOMBIES.

Oh my god it's an imperial officer working in a cubical!

I vaguely recall seeing some stormtroopers without their helmets in RotJ, just after they captured Han and the rest of 'em on Endor.

Oh dear god.. is that a turkey on that man's head!?

And Delphian is right. When Chewbacca goes Wookies*$@ in the AT-ST on Endor, they surround a bunch of Stormtroopers, who you see for a few seconds without their helmets.

And they are clearly different actors.

They're actually Rebels that stole the armor (besides, they're being surrounded by more stormies)