This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Deleted a rather pointless Justifying Edit in the Star Wars section.
- One EU book, Dark Rendevous, had droids specifically built with weapons that were nearly impossible for a Jedi to block. It takes two fully grown Jedi to take down less than a dozen of 'em, and one of the two is nearly killed. The only reason they're not employed in battle is that they're too expensive.
Eakin Does Pulp Fiction deserve a mention here?
Gus: Wouldn't Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship be a name that reflects the entry content better? It is about markmanship, not schools of any type. Better yet would be Stormtrooper Markmanship. Someone might actually use that in a sentence.
Looney Toons: I named the trope, back when I created it, for a Nancy Liebowitz button which read something like "Graduate, Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy", but I got it wrong ("Imperial School Of Marksmanship") — whoever renamed it later apparently was familiar with the button and corrected it accordingly. And, quite honestly, I find the "Academy" makes it a lot funnier for some reason.
Oh, and while I'm at it, something I found while looking for the right quote:
"A hypothetical paradox: What would happen in a battle between an Enterprise security team, who always get killed soon after appearing, and a squad of Imperial Stormtroopers, who can't hit the broad side of a planet?" — Tom Galloway
Susan Davis: I agree with Looney Toons: "Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy" is funny; "Stormtrooper Marksmanship" isn't. The fact that the name comes from an external source is also evidence that it's more widely accepted.
Gus<grumbles>...<kicks dust> <Swears a mighty oath that sometime, somewhere, brevity will RULE!>
Looney Toons: Would you like to talk about that at length? <grin>
Although I agree with most of the entry, I really don't think this is entirely fair to the stormtroopers. On the Death Star, they were supposed to miss. They were under orders to miss, Lord Vader wanted the Princess and her rescuers to get away. But on the transport earlier, they defeated the entire crew. Later, on Hoth, they overran the base and forced the Rebels to vacate their main headquarters, despite having to mount a ground assault against a fortified, dug-in position. And on Endor, the Ewoks had the special power of "the writers likes us" and the Imperials, despite being taken entirely off-guard, badly outnumbered, in largely unknown terrain, and having to cope with tactics they'd likely never been trained in countering, still managed to inflict severe casualties among the Ewoks. Stormtroopers are many things, but incompetent is not on list.
Seven Seals: Dude — you're defending Stormtroopers. They're the schlemiels of space opera. Sure, Stormtroopers win when the plot requires them to, but the point is that when squared off against the heroes, the plot never requires them to. When you take a step back and evaluate things objectively, maybe they didn't do so bad overall, but it hardly matters: what sticks with the viewers is that no matter how many of them are firing, the heroes never get hit while they drop like flies. Ewoks were not the heroes, so killing off a few was game.
Atom Fullerene: I've always figured that the imperials built the Death Star just to prove that they could, in fact, hit the broad side of a planet.
SAMAS Besides, the title comes from (IIRC) Roger Ebert's review of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where he used those exact words to describe the aiming skill of the Nazi cannon fodder.
((Blind Justice 15)) By the way, in Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny, the trope is heavily parodied by explaining the poor marksmanship of the guards at the Rock and Roll History Museum. The guards are stoned, and they have never fired guns before.
Gentlemens Dame 883: Moved the "Deep Rising" example to A-Team Firing, as this page explicitly states "only the bad guys suffer".
Medinoc: We also need a better example for "cartoon mooks", since the GI Joe one is A-Team Firing too.
zinfandel: I streamlined the massive series of justifications and counter-justifications for the Star Wars example. There was a serious argument put forth that while the Stormtroopers were perfectly good marksmen, Han, Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, Lando, that gray-haired guy in the white hat at the beginning of A New Hope, Lobot, the Ewoks, and anyone else who scores a hit on a trooper has SUPERHUMAN AIM. Dudes, it's a movie. The badguys can't hit anything or the story ends. Hence the trope.
NoDot: No, that is not what this trope is about. This trope is about a horrendous lack of accuracy to the badguy's shooting. The Imperial Stormtroopers, despite the name, do not qualify.
Large Blunt Object: Uploaded the image to Tropes (offsite images bad) and fixed the text.
Arivne: the Dick Tracy example is incorrect, so I have deleted it.
"The film version of Dick Tracy takes this to camp levels. 20+ thugs have taken cover behind vehicles and so forth and are shooting exclusively at the title character, who stands in the middle of the street in a bright yellow coat you can probably see from space. Naturally, he takes them all down without getting hit once."
Actually, all of the people hiding behind the vehicles are police officers who are shooting at the cars full of criminals crashing out through the building door. Dick Tracy is just one of many possible targets for the criminals, and is only under fire from one or two criminals at a time and for only a few seconds each. See it on YouTube here, starting around 2:25
.
Andrew: I had no idea Imperal Stormtroopers had so many fans and defenders.
HeartBurn Kid: Indeed they do, and they're prone to Natter. Time to prune the page...
Anon: Would the first Pirates of the Caribbean bear a mention? I understand that weapons were less accurate then, but christ! Jack is unarmed, has his wrists shackled together and is swinging around on giant wooden pole things, 20 feet away, with no cover.
- In IV, Vader's running a Xanatos Gambit dependent on them escaping.
- To make things "worse," they're on the Death Star-somewhere you don't expect to be attacked, so you guard it with people you don't expect to see much action, not your best troops who are needed elsewhere-and they still herded the heroes effectively.
- In VI, despite what Palpatine says, that's not a legion, that's a platoon, outnumbered, fighting an enemy on familiar and prepared terrain, and who have the support of a Rebel commando team. I'd like to see you try better.
- See also Apocalypse Endor, a one shot comic in which an ex-Stormtrooper recounts that Ewoks were basically tinier, furrier versions of the Vietcong.
- See also Apocalypse Endor
- In IV, Vader's running a Xanatos Gambit dependent on them escaping.
Andrew: Is True Lies really an Affectionate Parody? It's certainly light-hearted, but I never thought of it as a parody. The Last Action Hero, sure.
How about putting the image or quote from this
into the header?
Stormtroopers are actually very accurate - they can hit a target from the other side of a battlefield with a snap-shot from a handgun (end of Episode 6), and in every other shootout they come within inches of headshots several times. The main characters are just too good at dodging for them to get a direct hit.
Amusingly, plugging in 50 for n, 3 for x, and 1 for J yields 1/1138. Other tropers may recognize 1138 as part of the title of another work by George Lucas, as well as a number snuck into many of his other works (cell block 1138, anybody?).
