The Rise of Skywalker Forgot The Empire Already Had Flying Stormtroopers

The Rise of Skywalker Forgot The Empire Already Had Flying Stormtroopers

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker made a big deal out of the First Order having flying Stormtroopers, but they were a part of the Empire before that.

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The Rise of Skywalker Forgot The Empire Already Had Flying Stormtroopers

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker made a big deal out of the flying Stormtroopers, suggesting these jetpack-wearing variants were a new concept, but they were a part of the Empire decades before. The Rise of Skywalker attempted to introduce several new concepts to Star Wars canon, or at least what’s been shown in the movies, with decidedly mixed results. This included making Rey and Kylo Ren’s bond into a Force Dyad, and other Force powers not seen on the big screen before, such as Essence Transfer and Force Drain. This extended to its Stormtroopers too, whose designs are often subtly (or unsubtly) changed between the movies. Other variants included the red Sith Troopers, but the flying Stormtroopers – known as First Order jet troopers – proved controversial because of how they were introduced.

The First Order’s flying Stormtroopers were first glimpsed in a promo for The Rise of Skywalker, which saw the heroes being pursued by them on Pasaana. The fact that the Stormtroopers had jetpacks led to a gag among a few of the characters, including Poe Dameron, Finn, and C-3PO, as they each remarked on the fact that “They fly now!” The joke, which still factored into the full version of the sequence in the movie, may have been rather divisive (much like everything else in The Rise of Skywalker), but it’s arguably one that shouldn’t have been made anyway – because the idea of Stormtroopers flying with the use of jetpacks isn’t new.

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The idea of Stormtroopers wearing jetpacks pre-dates the First Order by a considerable margin. First appearing in the Expanded Universe (now Legends) back in 1993, the first troopers to wear jetpacks in canon arrived in The Clone Wars, meaning that the good guys were using them even before the villains were. The clone jet troopers made a couple of appearances, including as part of Anakin and Ahsoka’s mission in The Clone Wars season 5, episode 17, “Sabotage”. After the Empire took control of the galaxy, they may have replaced clone troopers with Stormtroopers, but the idea of jetpacks on them didn’t disappear. Known as Jumptroopers, the jetpack-wearing Stormtroopers – designed for aerial combat and drops – appear in a few episodes of Star Wars Rebels. They’re in action against several of the Ghost Crew members in season 3’s “Ghosts of Geonosis”, and subsequently appear in “Zero Hour” and “A Fool’s Hope”.

The jetpack Stormtroopers have appeared in other forms of media too, including Star Wars: Battlefront (which is where they were designated as Jumptroopers). Meanwhile, the versions found in The Rise of Skywalker also appeared in Star Wars canon before then – and in Poe Dameron’s comic series, no less. As the panel above shows, Poe himself even came into contact with the First Order jet troopers. It doesn’t make any sense for The Rise of Skywalker to present flying Stormtroopers as a new concept in canon, and it makes even less so for Poe to be the one who is so surprised by it.

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Of course, that fits with Disney’s general approach to canon, which tends to see the movies do whatever works for them, even if it means ignoring other tie-ins that are supposedly all part of the same world. Poe Dameron’s backstory in particular proved tricky with The Rise of Skywalker, which created some continuity issues with regards to what the comics had tried to establish. The “they fly now” line goes further, ignoring the setup that the First Order already had these Stormtroopers, and that the Empire had used them long beforehand as well. Poe, Finn et al may have been shocked that they fly now, but in truth they (almost) always did.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/star-wars-rise-skywalker-flying-stormtroopers-jetpacks-empire/

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