Bringing a new trooper online
How a briefly-seen background character adds to the larger canvas of George Lucas's world
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith turned a solid two decades old in 2025, and it's one of those milestones that's a little hard to believe. Disney recently re-released the film to theaters to mark the occasion, and it seemed like an ideal opportunity to get moving on a project that I've had lingering in my basement for longer than I'd care to admit: a 212th Airborne Clone Trooper from the film.
Since 2004, I've been a member of the 501st Legion, a world-wide Star Wars costuming group that extensively focuses on the franchise's "bad guys", which encompasses everyone from Darth Vader and the stormtroopers to some of the more ambiguously bad characters, like Jawas, background denizens. In the time that I've been part of the group, I've amassed a collection of costumes: a classic stormtrooper from A New Hope, a First Order heavy trooper from The Force Awakens, a Phase 1 clone trooper from Attack of the Clones, a shoretrooper from Rogue One, and a Blue Squadron rebel pilot from Rogue One.
It's quite the stack of boxes, and for years, and almost a decade ago, I had been working on another clone trooper costume for my wife. She lost interest in suiting up in it, and I decided that I wanted to move it to someone who'd use it. After a year or two listing it for sale, I got a message: a kid in Denmark was interested, but with a catch. He had another clone trooper costume that he'd built but wasn't really interested in keeping, and wanted to know if I'd be interested in trading. His costume? A finished 212th trooper. It was an easy decision to make, and we soon had one another's costumes in hand.
When they first appeared in Attack of the Clones, the Republic's clone troopers were pretty basic: white, with the officers painted different colors to denote rank. I had been enamored of the stormtroopers when I first saw them on the big screen. I didn't care that they were the bad guys: I just thought that the armor looked cool. When Episode 2 rolled around, I loved their predecessors just as much: troopers that shared a design language, but which were just different enough that they stood on their own. In the years between the two films, authors and artists filled in the story and put their own spin on the clones.
When The Clone Wars animated series debuted in 2008, its art department went even further: introducing tons of new designs and colors, sometimes specifically to to inspire the cosplayers they knew would be building them.
Rewatching Revenge of the Sith on the big screen the other week, I was impressed at how weird and fantastic this film is. From its wooden performances and forced, stilted storytelling, it's not a great movie, but it's a film with an ridiculous amount of ambition and craftsmanship in the mix, and if nothing else, it's just gorgeous to look at.
Watching it on a theatrical screen for the first time in 20 years, I was impressed at how much George Lucas stuffed into each frame, including tons of random troopers that sit in the back of the frame that you really wouldn't notice if you weren't looking for them.
That's where the 212th troopers come in. In the story, the 212th Attack Battalion is the unit that General Obi-Wan Kenobi leads is the 212th, with Commander Cody as his subordinate. These guys have a burned-yellow color scheme, with some bright stripes streaked across their armor, and they ended up getting a lot of screentime in The Clone Wars.
But if you look closely during Revenge of the Sith, you see another subset of troopers, ones festooned with some extra webbing and gear strapped to them, and with a zany-looking helmet. When the 212th goes into action on the planet Utapau to back up Obi-Wan as he heads out to capture a high-level target, you catch a couple of glimpses of these troopers in the background.
Andrew Liptak
They're truly blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments, but what I love about these troopers is how much these specific troopers add to the larger story by only being in a couple of frames of the film.
The blank white armor plates were the perfect canvas for all sorts of wild designs and color schemes, and it's a good way to signal to the audience that while the fresh-off-the-line troopers we saw in Attack of the Clones had matured and grown in the intervening years. These weren't just mindless automatons being pressed into combat but people in their own right, and they used paint (and in The Clone Wars, tattoos) to denote their identities and individuality beyond the ranks they held.
(I'd highly recommend checking out Karen Traviss's Republic Commando novels for more of this–she did an excellent job bringing them to life.)
But more than that, we see that the war had its own impact on the way the troopers saw themselves, and the types of combat they were involved in. Beyond the change in helmets (to better line up with the original trilogy stormtroopers), we saw a ton of different equipment variations: airborne, cold weather, desert, and heavy-weapons troopers, equipped with binoculars, backpacks, jetpacks, scuba gear, bags, and quite a bit more. All of this speaks to a military force that went into combat with one set of gear, and ended up learning and adapting as they went. New helmets and equipment suggested domain and mission-specific needs so that they could operate effectively in the field.
Once you see it, it's a good indicator of the larger world that we're seeing only glimpses of, and it's an outstanding storytelling technique that allowed Lucas and his collaborators to signal that Star Wars is a vast sandbox. That's one of its strengths: it's easy to drop those details in with dialogue or stories that say or show the physical size or scale of the place, but it's another thing altogether to design a whole bunch of background characters that you only glimpse for a moment to really drive the point home.
I don't remember exactly where I first noticed the 212th Airborne Clones. Probably on some rewatch, or by coming across one of the action figures that flooded toy store shelves while the film was in theaters. But I remember being captivated by them: something about the bright orange, white, and black color scheme, and the equipment that they're loaded down with.
While building my Shoretrooper costume back in 2016 ahead of Rogue One, I came across a useful tutorial from Adam Savage: how to weather props and costumes. Using watered-down acrylic paints, rags, and a little imagination, he took a new-looking object and made it look like it had been well-worn with age. Weathering, I came to realize, was a type of storytelling in and of itself: each ding, caked-on grime or dirt, crack, and coat of dust gives the audience an indication of the things they've experienced. Looking at the official images of these troopers, you could tell that they had been put through the ringer. They were pockmarked and dinged up, moreso than the regular line troopers.
When the opportunity arose to snag one of these troopers, I jumped at the chance: not only did they look cool, but suiting up as one would bring that world to life for bystanders.
Picking up a costume from someone else is always a bit fraught. 501st members generally build their own costumes, either from scratch or from a kit, and as you build, you typically tailor them to your own body type. Sometimes, you'll get a costume from someone your height and weight. In other times, you have to make some adjustments.
This costume took several years of off-and-on work to get to where I could wear it. It mostly worked out of the box: the helmet, chest, torso, and arms fit, but the legs needed some significant work, and I'd go through phases where I'd pull it out, list out what needed to fix, realize it was a daunting amount of work, and put it away for a little while before repeating the process. The original maker took some shortcuts when he built it, and I ended up commissioning a new bag from a friend, swapped out the regular Velcro with an industrial strength version, screwed on the column of ammo cartridges on the left shoulder, and other minor upgrades here and there.
The biggest obstacle was the shins, something that was emblematic of a problem with the clone trooper costumes: until Lucasfilm released Obi-Wan Kenobi in 2022, all of the Clone Troopers you saw on screen were CGI, and as such, the designers didn't need to worry about the finer details like "how does a person actually put this on and wear it?" As a result, clones armor can be a bit uncomfortable: it digs in in weird places and has a lot of parts, like the knees and elbows, that can shift around as you walk.
When folks looked at the images, they didn't see any seams where these pieces of armor could open. That's fine for things like the parts that cover one's upper arms, forearms, and thighs, because those pieces tend to be wider and can slide right on. One's shins have to slide on over your foot and calf, and these parts just aren't designed for that. The 501st devised a workaround: cutting the back out of the shin lets you slide one's foot in and twist it around, siding the "spoon" back into place once it's on, which lets a builder have a seamless piece of armor.
My shins and calves aren't shaped like that, and no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get it to work, and it was a frustrating problem: I wanted to get this armor together and wearable, but I could just never get it to work.
With Revenge of the Sith coming up soon, I resorted to a workaround of my own – with the exception of the helmet, the clone's basic armor is the same, so I swapped out the shins from my AOTC clone (which didn't need to be seamless when I got them approved way back when), and asked my Garrison Membership Liaison officer if it would be okay to do for the screening. I got the approval for a "day pass" and ended up bringing it out for the screening.
There's still a little more work to be done on it: I want to swap out some straps, replace the kama, get some better ventilation in the helmet, and a couple of other things here and there, but for the event? It held up spectacularly well: nothing fell off or really needed that much adjustment, and it looked pretty cool in the group pictures. Some fans recognized the character and came up to take pictures with me, and after taking if all off, it turned out to be a really excellent way to give the suit a test run and see what else I needed for it to get it over the formal approval line. Hopefully, now that I know it's something that I can actually wear, it'll be push I need to get it added to my roster.
And then, it's onto the next costume.