Tuesday music spot: "The Final Countdown"

"The final countdown" sung by the band Europe, with a visual track of scenes from the Battle of Geonisis from Star Wars Episode II, "Attack of the Clones."

This is the battle which made all Star Wars fans at the time think "Oh, that's why Obi-Wan Kenobi thinks Storm Troopers can shoot straight."

Near the start of the original Star Wars film, "Episode IV, A New Hope," Obi-Wan refers to  Imperial Stormtroopers shooting accurately. This line was ridiculed by fans because for the rest of that film and the original trilogy, Stormtroopers were notorious for being unable to shoot straight when firing at the heroes (e.g. characters with "plot armour" who cannot die if the story is to make sense.) 

My son fell about laughing while we were watching "The Mandalorian" when the character Mayfield, who is an Imperial army veteran and a sniper, reacts defensively to a joke about whether an Imperial soldier could be a good shot, and says something like "Hey, I wasn't a storm trooper!" 

At this my son nearly fell off his chair with laughter and exclaimed "It's now canon that Stormtroopers can't hit the side of a barn!"

In this battle we first see the Republic's Clone Army, who wear armour which looks very similar to that of Stormtroopers, and who are shooting very accurately indeed, as enemy robots are scythed down by the clone army's fire. The natural assumptions was that these troopers are the origin of the Stormtroopers, and that they can shoot straight when they're not shooting at characters with "plot armour."

In fact we learned much later in Disney Plus shows like "The Bad Batch" that the clone troopers who first saw action in this battle are not the same as the Imperial Stormtroopers of a generation later, they just wear similar armour. But it seemed like a logical explanation at the time!


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