Column: Why is nobody mentioning the real issue with LEGO Star Wars Clone Troopers?

The discourse around LEGO Star Wars Clone Troopers is reaching fever pitch, but nobody seems to have mentioned the real issue with these army-building minifigures.

The great LEGO Star Wars Clone Trooper drought of the late 2010s is over, and we are now firmly in LEGO Star Wars Clone Trooper high season. At the moment, you can buy no fewer than 10 different flavours of Clone Trooper in official sets, from four or five different legions. There are multiple commanders and captains in boxes, with more rumoured to be on the way, and all manner of different soldier classes.

That’s not even counting the two new Coruscant Guard troopers and Commander Fox, who are due to join the ranks of currently-available Clone Troopers on September 1 in 75354 Coruscant Guard Gunship. As a complete portfolio, it feels like a genuine response from the LEGO Star Wars team to continued calls from the community, and that’s something that really ought to be celebrated.

But because nothing is ever good enough, to mangle the LEGO Group’s original motto into something slightly more relevant to 2023, the designers have come under fire for their particular approach to Clone Troopers. And that’s fine! We shouldn’t be afraid to point out where things could be better. But right now, the focus of that ire feels… misdirected.

Most of the complaints around the current cohort of Clone Troopers have so far have centred on the accessory connection points in the new Phase II helmet mould, which was introduced with the 212th Legion in last summer’s 75337 AT-TE Walker. That bucket has since become the new gold standard for all Clone Troopers, including those in 75345 501st Clone Troopers Battle Pack and 75359 332nd Ahsoka’s Clone Trooper Battle Pack.

The tiny holes allow for accessories including visors and rangefinders to be attached to the helmets, paving the way for different ranks and classes of troopers. (The soldiers in 75345 501st Clone Troopers Battle Pack are all specialist types pulled from Star Wars: Battlefront II, for example.) But while this one-size-fits-all approach works just fine for the clunky old visors we’ve been using since 2008, it’s not so great for the rangefinders, which sit altogether too high. (The LEGO Group practically admitted as much in the renders of its 501st battle pack this year.)

The bigger issue – at least as pockets of the community see it – is that these holes shouldn’t be included on standard troopers, where accessories aren’t necessary, because they’re not accurate to the armour we see on screen. And sure: from an accuracy perspective, they’re maybe not ideal. But they’re also not the end of the world – and if it’s accuracy you’re striving for, maybe you should be looking a little closer at these minifigures’ arms and legs.

Placing the minifigures side-by-side with their source material, the more obvious issues quickly come to the fore. There’s the absent accent markings on the arms of the 501st and 187th Legions, for one: the blue and purple shoulders do a lot of heavy lifting in carrying each soldier’s respective colours across their armour, but the LEGO minifigure arms are completely plain. This is true of all LEGO Clone Troopers.

But I reckon there’s an even bigger problem with modern LEGO Clone Trooper minifigures. It’s one that’s been bubbling away under the surface since 75342 Republic Fighter Tank pulled the 187th Legion from the depths of Hasbro obscurity for reasons known only to the LEGO Group and Lucasfilm, and it’s rearing its head again with the Coruscant Guard troopers in 75354 Coruscant Guard Gunship.

In the Hasbro action figures and the Clone Wars TV show, both the 187th and Coruscant Guard have colour-matched boots. The LEGO Star Wars team has tried to reflect that by giving their minifigures knee and toe printing, because apparently the technology still doesn’t exist to print in the space between those two sections. But that white gap means the minifigures just end up looking like they’re wearing tiny little pumps.

There are solutions to both these problems – arm printing, dual-moulded legs – but presumably the extra expense involved has proven too much for the LEGO Group’s profit margins to bear. If we can’t have dual-moulded boots on our troopers, though (and these are tiny toys rather than Hot Toys figures, so it’s hardly a requirement), I’d rather we just didn’t have toe printing at all.

The Shock Troopers included in 2014’s 75046 Coruscant Police Gunship look streets ahead – despite being nearly a decade old now – for having their leg printing stop at their knees, to the extent that I’ll probably just swap their legs out when I get my hands on 75354 Coruscant Guard Gunship. That’s not so easy for the 187th, though (no prior version exists), and if you don’t already have a couple of classic Shock Troopers to hand, you might find that part swap an expensive prospect now.

In an ideal world, the LEGO Group would swallow the costs of dual-moulding for the Clone Troopers that really need it, and add arm printing for the rest. But this is reality, so I know I’m just Abe Simpson yelling at a cloud right now. And given the collective voice of the community seems to be singing an entirely different song, I fully expect the helmet holes to disappear before we get better printing or dual-moulding. C’est la vie.

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