Stormtrooper effect

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The Stormtrooper effect, also called Stormtrooper syndrome, is a cliché in works of fiction where minor characters are unrealistically ineffective in combat against more important characters. The name originated with the Imperial Stormtroopers in the original Star Wars trilogy, who, despite their considerable advantages of close range, overwhelming numbers, professional military training, full armor, military-grade firepower, and noticeable combat effectiveness against non-speaking characters, were incapable of seriously harming or indeed even hitting the films' protagonists.

The Stormtrooper effect is, in fact, much older than the Star Wars trilogy, and is common in cowboy films, action movies, martial arts films, and comics. It is often a source of mockery by critics, satirists and fandom, but it is generally recognized as quickly and effectively heightening the dramatic tension of a story.

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[edit] Examples & correlations

The minor characters, no matter how much training or skill they are claimed to have, are usually incapable of hitting the major characters, sometimes demonstrating extremely poor aim. A good example is of course the stormtroopers from the Star Wars movies, who despite their supposed training/conditioning sometimes appear incapable of hitting the proverbial barn door.

— A commonly cited correlation is that the more "bad guys" and the more volume of fire they produce, the less likely they will hit the protagonist.

Star Wars hit probability equation: A simple and comical equation to represent the Stormtrooper phenomenon is described[citation needed] as such:

P_{hit}=\left ( \frac{1}{n+ \left [ x+1 \right ] ^3+ \left [ J+1\right ]^{10}} \right )
whereas n=the number of "bad guys", x=the number of "good guys", and J=the number of Jedi present, if any. The equation reads, "The probability of a bad guy hitting his target is equal to the inverse of all bad guys present plus the cube of the number of good guys present (plus one) plus the number of Jedi present (plus one) to the tenth power." From this, one can infer that the presence of a good guy has a detrimental effect on the bad guys' accuracy, while having even one Jedi present is a veritable death sentence.

The minor characters are unrealistically easy to kill. Again a good example is the Imperial stormtroopers who appear armored yet seem to fall over apparently dead from a single shot to the abdomen or even to the shoulder, however this could be due to the armor being built as an environmental survival suit, as opposed to clone trooper armor.

[edit] The Inverse Ninja Law

The Inverse Ninja Law is a similar phenomenon that occurs frequently in martial arts movies, and role playing games. It is also sometimes called the Anime Ninja Effect, the Rule of One, or less frequently the Inverse Ninja Effectiveness Principle.

The Inverse Ninja Law states that the effectiveness of a group of villains is inversely proportional to the number of villains in the group. While a single enemy is often portrayed as a significant threat to the protagonists, a large group of enemies are significantly less of a threat, and as such are easily defeated.

Some shows tend to explicitly illustrate the Inverse Ninja Law. Often the heroes' first battle is against a small group or even a single member of the villains' basic foot soldiers, giving the entire group problems, sometimes to the point that they have to use their signature finishing move to defeat them. In most of their subsequent appearances, however, the heroes will usually easily defeat a large group of the enemy, who are typically all wearing the same outfit. Sometimes this is inexplicable; other times, however, the heroes receive a power-up, or simply find the opponent's Achilles' heel. A noteworthy example is Power Rangers, which played out that scenario for nearly every revamp of the series.

The film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shows both effects of this law: multiple times in the film, the turtles defeat dozens of Foot Ninja, but are defeated at the end of the film by the lone Shredder, even when they assault him together. As well, one Foot Ninja is able to track the turtles to their lair and spy on them undetected, despite the ninjitsu skills of the turtles and their master, proving this lone ninja was more effective on his own than in a group.

The ninja anime Naruto somewhat solves this problem. Hatake Kakashi once said that the ideal number of ninja in a given team is four.

[edit] Manifestations

The Stormtrooper effect may manifest in several different forms.

  • When combined with the Inverse Ninja Law, the Stormtrooper effect takes on the meaning of "The accuracy of the attacker is inversely proportional to the number of attackers". While two or three attackers pose a serious threat, a room full of them all firing at once is almost never a serious threat. An example is found in Star Wars: A New Hope where the protagonist (in this case, Han Solo) takes great pains to avoid small patrols of only two to three Stormtroopers, yet rounding a corner and finding a room filled with them is used more for comedic effect than it is a threat.
  • Cannon fodder are extremely poor combatants who, regardless of their supposed training or weapons, cannot inflict harm upon the protagonists. They are extremely easy to defeat despite any armor or protective cover, each one typically requiring only a single shot or blow to defeat. This is used in the official Star Wars D20 RPG, and the Mutants and Masterminds RPG, where Stormtroopers and other thugs do not possess "Vitality Points", which mimics the "character shield". As in M&M, they die in one hit, as well as the Foot Soldiers from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It is directly spoofed in Feng Shui, the "action movie roleplaying game", which goes so far as to classify all bad guys as either "mooks" or "named bad guys". Named bad guys have hit points and can resist damage. Mooks, like the faceless, disposable mob that they are, are removed from the game after being successfully hit once. The game rules even specify that it does not matter if the mook has been killed, knocked out, or merely wounded -- they're not in the fight any more and they'll never be seen again afterwards, so who cares what their actual fate was?
  • Cannon fodder can only be effective when the plot requires it, such as in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when they are unable to hit Indy while he runs vulnerably on elevated scaffolding with no cover, but are able to hit a rail switch from a fast-moving minecart.
  • Cannon fodder can sometimes be defeated by simply knocking them down, or throwing them to the ground. This will render them unconscious or dazed, unable to get up for the remainder of that scene. This is for example seen in the Power Rangers series.
  • When an important character is injured, the wound is usually trivial and not life-threatening; as seen in Predator, where the predator's plasma caster kills Blaine (Jesse Ventura) but, glancing off his rifle, merely injures Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Common locations for injury are the shoulder and upper arm, thigh, and the lower side torso, where the risks of paralysis and damage to vital organs are minimized.
    • Even if an important character's wound is severe, it only enhances the dramatic effect of the scene and is rarely incapacitating. If it is incapacitating, he or she can still get CPR and survive, in the style of Jack Bauer from 24. A good parody of this is in the final scenes of the The Last Action Hero where Jack Slater is mortally wounded in the real world, but when he's brought back into his movie, the fatal injury becomes just a flesh wound.
  • Cannon fodder can accomplish something against comparable numbers of other cannon fodder to demonstrate their combat prowess, but not against the underwhelmingly smaller numbers of main characters. This has given rise to the notion that when protagonists are present, the fodders' combat skills degrade. An example would be the destruction of the Jawa Sandcrawler (where the blaster hits were described by Obi-Wan Kenobi as being "too precise" for Sandpeople and thus must be from stormtroopers) and subsequent death of Luke's family.
  • Cannon fodder can sometimes be seen "waiting their turns" when fighting protagonists. A closer look some scenes of a fighting sequence may show parts of the group of cannon fodder doing nothing while waiting for their comrades to be defeated first (Although, such as in the ninja attack in Kill Bill, this may be attributed to a fear of "going first").
    • This concept is notably seen in certain episodes of Walker: Texas Ranger, when Walker (Chuck Norris) stands in the middle of a ring of thugs, who run at Walker, one at a time and are each soundly defeated in turn.
  • The Stormtrooper effect also applies in many video games, in which most enemies only pose a threat to inexperienced players, or when the player already has some factors going against them (such as difficult terrain). An example is in games like Knights of the Old Republic; although the assassins and thugs have advantages like double-bladed swords and active camouflage, they are easily killed by the protagonist.
    • The Dynasty Warriors series is especially notable as your forces, as well as the enemies, are somewhat weak, but your character is capable of wiping out hundreds of soldiers without much trouble, and it often becomes easier the less forces you have along with you.
  • In Terry Pratchett's Discworld series the effect is known as "the Lore". It is one of the laws of physics on the fictional world, that the smaller the number of heroes and the larger the number of fodder, the more likely the heroes are to win. In The Last Hero, the handful of heroes, who were normally the outnumbered ones, realize that they are up against a single man — Carrot Ironfoundersson — and therefore are wary of attacking him.
  • In the martial arts movie The One, a form of the Inverse Ninja Law is an actual law of nature and a critical plot point. In it, the villain attempts to eliminate the alternate-universe versions of himself, thus redistributing their combined strength, speed, and durability among the ones that remain. By the time there are only two left, they are both superhuman.
  • In the original cartoon version of Aeon Flux, the Stormtrooper effect is actually exaggerated, when the main character runs between two walls with enemy soldiers on top firing at her, and manages to hit every last one of them without herself being hit.
  • It is impossible for cannon fodder to hit a main character while a main plot point is occurring. An example of this in The Lord of the Rings movies where Aragorn will stop in the middle of a chaotic battle to observe an important event, and orcs are no more than five feet away from him but make no attempt to attack.
  • A character might get wounded and stay out of a scene for a short while but but only to appear healed a moment later.
  • It is a cliché in many war movies or action films that, despite being armed with superior--often automatic--firearms, infantry are often far less effective than a commander or captain is with a simple pistol. This is seen in the 1970s blaxploitation film Three the Hard Way, in which the main characters, armed with not much more than glorified cap pistols, are able to take on and defeat a group of attackers armed with fully-automatic machine guns.
  • Large explosions unrealistically damage protagonists instead of killing them, even at point blank range. The effect of the explosion usually comes in two forms. One way is the explosion acts similar to a smoke screen in order to conceal the true extent of what happened, only to reveal later that the hero miraculously survives. An example of this can be seen at the end of the movie, Predator, several times in the anime Gundam Seed, and (arguably) in half of Gundam Wing. The second way is the explosion creates a shockwave which hurls the protagonist(s) away from the actual explosion. This can be seen at the end of the movie, Alien vs. Predator.

[edit] Nullification in Star Wars

In A New Hope, Obi-Wan explains to Luke that Sand People were not responsible for the deaths of the Jawas but instead makes an interesting note on the Stormtroopers' accuracy: "These blast points... too accurate for Sand People. Only Imperial Stormtroopers are so precise." Proponents have claimed this shows stormtroopers are accurate when they have to be, or are perhaps camera-shy, a suggestion enhanced by the fact that the stormtroopers on the Tatooine assignment are members of the same elite 501st Legion that crushed Rebel resistance on Hoth and aboard the Tantive IV in surprisingly little time. The 501st in Revenge of the Sith eliminated the Jedi most effectively, although this is at least partly attributable to the surprise nature of their attack. When Luke and his companions are escaping the Death Star later in the movie the Stormtroopers fail to hit them despite numerous opportunities, but it is subsequently revealed that they were ordered to allow the escape so that the escapees could be tracked while making it look like they are serious in attacking them.

This explanation seems somewhat mitigated in other cases however, such as in Return of the Jedi on Endor in which the Stormtroopers very frequently and almost invariably miss Han Solo and Leia (though a blaster bolt grazes Leia's shoulder, and they kill several Ewoks) while the protagonists once again take down numerous stormtroopers without getting killed. Here, the Emperor explicitly states that the forest moon of Endor was to be a "trap" with a legion of his "best troops" awaiting them, apparently suggesting that he had no intention of letting the rebels escape this time. This, then, shows the hand of the director in the movie, as the markmanship of the troops storming Tantive IV is first rate and they suffer minimal casualties (almost none once they clear the first corridor). It should be noted, however, that in Return of the Jedi, the antagonists have a much higher accuracy in general. Non-Imperial thugs land non-lethal blaster hits on both Chewbacca and Luke during the skiff battle on Tatooine. Imperial blaster fire likewise incapacitates R2-D2 on Endor.

In a small and unwitting reference to Stormtrooper Effect, The Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner remarked during the commentary while Chewbacca and Leia are fleeing Cloud City that, for some reason, "Good guys always shoot straight. I don't know why, but they do." This inexplicable rule also holds true in the Star Wars spoof Spaceballs. "Keep firing, assholes!"

[edit] In video gaming

The Stormtrooper effect often manifests itself in computer games, given that it is easier for the game creators to program a non-intelligent enemy and insert many of them into a level than it is to create even a single very intelligent enemy. Thus, enemies will seem to pose more danger by their strength in numbers even though they are individually weak. This game mechanic means that the player still stands the risk of dying, increasing the challenge without necessarily increasing the complexity of the game program.

The Stormtrooper effect is essential to some video games, many of which have the player fighting hundreds or thousands of adversaries; all of whom are much more vulnerable to the in-game weapons than the player, and whose behaviours are far more predictable than a human player's would be.

Changes in videogaming technology have altered this in some cases; using 3D vector graphics for enemy players means that rendering huge hordes of enemies is very taxing on computational resources. Therefore, some game designers have changed their approach to use fewer but smarter enemies. The Stormtrooper effect is also much less prevalent in multiplayer games.

[edit] Cultural references

A common joke is to cite an "Imperial Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship", whose graduates are inexplicably poor shots; for example, "The Nazis in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade must all have studied at the Imperial Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship."[1] The GURPS roleplaying game even included optional rules titled Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy designed to make large numbers of nameless characters ineffective.

In the episode "And the Wiener is..." of the television show Family Guy, Peter attends a firing range of the "National Gun Association" (a parody of the NRA) where a man is shown firing and hitting a target, a blind man is shown hitting the broad side of a barn, and finally a Stormtrooper is shown widely missing every shot at a target resembling Luke Skywalker.

In the cult film UHF, during a Rambo-style fantasy sequence, George Newman ("Weird Al" Yankovic) easily mows down dozens of enemy soldiers after they fire at him and miss. Another soldier is killed after he shoots at George several times and misses, despite taking time to carefully aim and being little more than arm's length away with a clear shot.

The film Austin Powers in Goldmember mocks the Stormtrooper effect, where at one point, the character of Nigel Powers asks Dr. Evil's henchmen who are holding him at gunpoint "Is this your first day on the job or something? Look, you attack me one at a time, and I knock you out with a single punch, okay? Go." And the henchmen follow their orders and attack separately, each falling to the ground with a single chop to the neck. When a third henchman appears, Nigel asks him "Do you know who I am? Have you any idea how many anonymous henchmen I've killed over the years? Look at you! You haven't even got a name tag. You've got no chance." The henchman then proceeds to lie down and play dead, to save time. Likewise in the film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Austin Powers easily dispatches several guards with a pistol, while the henchmen are unable to kill him despite their superior weapons and the fact that he is standing still. He achieves this feat twice, when he goes back in time and kills the guards again (He dosen't even have a gun the second time).

In the movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, during a scene when the character Marvin the robot is walking through a field of Vogon blaster shots, he remarks, "I don't know what all the fuss is about. Vogons are the worst marksmen in the universe." Indeed, earlier in the movie no Vogon blaster shot has managed to hit its target. Moments after speaking the line Marvin is hit in the back of the head. In defense of Marvin's comment, Marvin's head is roughly five times the size of a human head, approximately 1 yard in diameter, and spherical. The Vogons are also aiming for something else at the time.

In the TV program Red Dwarf, in the episode "Quarantine", when running away from the psychotic hologram Dr. Lanstrom who has manifested a kind of psychic laser-vision Lister comments "Why can't we ever meet anyone nice?". The Cat, running past the camera, then says "Why can't we ever meet anyone who can shoot straight?", an obvious reference to the Stormtrooper effect.

In the 1995 film Desperado, the character of El Mariachi, played by Antonio Banderas, is able to slay an entire bar full of armed patrons during the film (this feat actually occurs twice, once in the beginning of the film, and once again later in the film, however it is later revealed that the first occurrence was being made up by the story teller). El Mariachi even taunts one of his attackers by shouting, "Hah hah! You missed me!" At the end of the film, he is also able to take down a half-dozen armed guards and the main bad guy at point blank range using only two .45 automatics (although this firefight wasn't shown). In the sequel, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, El Mariachi and two partners successfully take on the Mexican army and rescue the President.

Among Spanish speakers, a common saying is "Mas lento que el caballo del malo", which translates roughly as "You run slower than the bad guy's horse".[citation needed]

The parody movie Epic Movie spoofs that rule in the final battle scene by showing the opposite and thus what would happen in the real world when the four main protagonists, Lucy, Susan, Peter and Edward, got "killed" or rather defeated in mere seconds by the endless army of the White Bitch without having had the time to harm a single opponent.

At the end of the movie Shanghai Noon, Owen Wilson's character's monk's robe is completely riddled with dozens of bullet holes, but not a single one has actually hit his body. With a look of wonder and a glance at the church crucifix, he mutters, "I am invincible," and recklessly charges a group of bad guys, again without getting hit.

In the parody movie Hot Shots! Part Deux, the protagonist Topper Harley is able to hit many nameless soldiers, going to the point of even throwing handfuls of unspent bullets at a group of approaching soldiers, killing them all. Yet none of them are able to hit him. There is one point in the film that has a "Body Count" list at the bottom of the screen while making video game-type sounds, showing when the count hits the same as that of previous movies; eventually, "Bloodiest Movie of All Time" is achieved. When he is shot later in the film, it is by a single soldier.

In Pulp Fiction, when Jules and Vincent are retrieving the briefcase, an unnamed assailant unloads his pistol at them from accross the room, missing both of them with every shot. After this, the protagonists pause, look at eachother, then very accurately shoot the unnamed man.

In the action movie True Lies, the wife, who has no weapons training, drops a machine gun down a flight of stairs, killing a half dozen nameless bad guys as it fires each time it hits a step.

[edit] Related phenomena

The Stormtrooper effect appears in the cinematic rules of the GURPS role playing system, other effects under the cinematic rules include Bulletproof nudity and mini-nukes/firecrackers. Under the Bulletproof nudity rules the fewer clothes the heroes wears the better his or her protection from incoming fire, e.g. Rambo & Conan the Barbarian. Under the mini nukes/firecracker rule a hand grenade in the hands of a hero will have the ability of wiping out endless numbers of cannon fodder, whilst the same grenade in the hands of the enemy will instantly transmute into a firecracker only able to blacken the faces of the heroes and maybe singe or dislodge some of their clothes a little; and thereby instantly improving the hero's Bulletproof nudity. Heroes will always have an infinite amount of ammunition unless dictated otherwise by dramatic necessity, however the hero will find that any random source of ammunition he finds will instantly restore his store of infinite ammunition. (e.g. Have you ever seen Walker or Trevette of Walker, Texas Ranger reload or feed a new magazine in their hand guns? At one point, Walker used a Colt .45 revolver and has been seen in some episodes firing in excess of 16 shots without visibly reloading. Never in a single episode of Walker, Texas Ranger has a Ranger had an ammunition issue.)

[edit] See also

[edit] Sources

  1. ^ GURPS Special Ops by Greg Rose, p. 123. Published 1989 by Steve Jackson Games
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