monkey boy

except it's also kinda the opposite. we're (the US i mean) rushing troops through boot camp because we need them fast during a time of war, the empire made sure its war army was the best it could be, then it did a rush job on the peacekeeping troops

dunno if it's just my comp but the pic looks the same. didja do somethin to it joe?

thanks! the drawings are done in a sketchbook, so they're 8.5" x 11". i do them in my spare time, and depending on how detailed i want to get, they usually a day or two of working off and on. i'd say they probably take altogether between 3 and 5 hours.

But Vader did do so. Why else do you think he stopped Boba Fett from shooting Chewie in ESB? Because Chewie had 3PO on his back. As to R2,Vader never ran into him during the OT. i think that's hilarious. vader is a being of no compassion, he strikes down his greatest and oldest friend, obi-wan kenobi. i'm sure he felt closer to obi-wan than he did to a protocol droid he abandoned when he was halfway done.

especially when you take into account the accelerated aging of clones in the SW universe.

wow, thanks for the tip! right now i just use a cheap mechanical pencil gets the job done though!

and you forgot that money was only part of what i mentioned. time, energy, manpower. why waste them on building an army when you've got plenty of recruits and conscripts?

shorten the podrace? never! give the movies a break, who has time to actually go in and re-edit the movies. they're not that bad.

the gunner mold gets a bad rap, but it's not horrible. the arms have nothing but cut joints, which is unfortunate, but the legs have better articulation than any other clone figure. plus, the removable helmet is cool.

He could have easily found another perfect warrior to clone. why? they seemed to do fine with the stormtroopers. for 20 years the empire ruled with an iron fist, and rather successfully. why would they expend the time and energy and manpower and money to find another "perfect warrior" to clone. the clone army was ridiculously expensive, as was jango's fee (which they mentioned in the movie was considerable). palpatine needed it because he was facing jedi, very powerful adversaries. once the jedi were wiped out and forgotten, stormtroopers kept the galaxy in line just fine, as far as the empire was concerned. the empire fell due to its overconfidence. they didn't think they needed highly trained troops cloned from the perfect warrior anymore.

We know Bail Organa told Capt.Antilles To wipe the protocal droids memory but perhaps R2-D2's memory was wiped also. Why do only one droid and leave the other with full memory of everything. Vader never forgot his true name He told Luke " That name no longer holds any meaning for me." Luke said he forgot not Vader. Look Lucas didn't have all the clone Idea's yet when he Did IV, V and VI He thought of it after Episode I Give the guy a break. He did this as he went along. It's been like 23 years since I saw episide IV's original release. Idea's change as time goes on. That's just it...........Lucas has been quoted several times saying he had the whole story FROM THE OUTSET, and just didn't have the technical means to create the images he wanted. There appears to have been some stretching of the the truth from him....because its obvious it was made up as he went along. i'm sure he had the general story in his mind, but the specifics weren't developed until he actually had the means to make the movie. however, lucas HAS been quoted as saying that the only one who knows the whole story is r2d2, which i think is lame.

no one ever said obi doesn't remember artoo. he just says he never owned a droid. he never owned artoo, though he did know him. even before the prequels, i always thought kenobi was just being coy in this scene. he knew the droid, and he knew why it was there. artoo, in my opinion, acts stupider in the prequels than he does in the original trilogy. in the original trilogy he's intelligent and a bit cynical, in the prequels he's just wacky comic relief. as for his gizmos and doo-dads, yeah that's kinda dumb, perhaps he was just downgraded over the years. as far as vader not recognizing his own droids...first off, when he becomes darth vader he completely forsakes his other life. everything is gone to him, his wife is dead, his friends betrayed him (so he thinks)...secondly, throughout the movies we see tons of protocol and astromech droids. many of them look extremely similar. can you tell the difference between TC-14 and C-3P0? if they were next to each other maybe, but not if i was used to seeing protocol droids everywhere. same with astromech droids. artoo not recognizing yoda. well perhaps he knows, but how is he going to tell luke? perhaps in fighting with yoda, he was merely trying to get luke's possessions back from yoda, who for all artoo knows seems to have lost his mind. artoo's loyalty is to luke, not yoda. all these inconsistencies and whatnots, the truth is probably just because lucas had more technological freedoms and wanted to surprise the audience with various relationships. but if you apply some simple common sense, it's fairly easy to connect the dots yourself.

i think they thought they'd sell better if different clones had different features. people buy the AT TE because of the removable helmet. also, i heard this somewhere but i dunno if it's true, but for hasbro to release sufficient numbers of different clones at the same time, they need two molds. if the same mold is being used for two characters, released concurrently, they need to divide the time between each character, so you get half of what you would get if you had a different mold churning out each character. just a few theories, but if just about every clone used the same body sculpt, i doubt they'd sell as well. people will only buy the same thing so many times. the bacara thing, your guess is as good as mine. that thing sucks.

i think the variations and lack of colorization is a problem of a lack of budget in the original trilogy. when you can make all the clones computer animated it's much easier to have variations in color and armor. i think as far as continuity goes, during the prequels the clone army is in its fledgling years. they're still working out the kinks as far as what they're going for in terms of uniformity. once the empire is formed, things are streamlined, clones are made more uniform, armor is standardized in white to make it more striking, what have you. makes enough sense to me.

it's been established that by the time the clone troopers gave way to the stormtroopers, they were using conscripts and imperial academy graduates and no long relied solely on clones to fill out the troop ranks.