Are storm troopers meant to look silly?

While playing Lego Star Wars this evening, I noticed the way the stormtroopers seem to skip-hop when they move. Actually, the reason I took note was because it was exactly in time to a Ting Tings song that was playing in the background. Then I remembered a comment MJ made when I couldn't control my stormtrooper on a certain level: "well what do you expect? you're a stormtrooper." This made me wonder...were these agents of the empire actually meant for comedic relief?

I couldn't find a straight answer, and I don't have time to watch one of the movies this evening to just give my own opinion, so instead you get a brief history of what the stormtroopers were:

Apparently just typing "stormtrooper" into Wikipedia brings up the real-life counterpart: specialist German military troops formed late in WWI. They used new infiltration techniques for trench warfare. Hmmm...

Ok, for our purposes, the first stormtroopers were actually clone troopers that survived the Clone Wars. They were modeled after Jango Fett. 3 other kinds of troopers joined these originals, but all of them retained some resemblance to Jango. In the earlier movies we see the troopers as fighters protecting Queen Amidalla, later the Jedi lose their influence and we see them fighting alongside Darth Vader.

So how does one sign up for service as a stormtrooper?


If a man wanted to sign up, he would be between the ages of 18-30. If he scored within the top fifth percentile, he would be contacted for possible cloning. Others who didn't score so high were wanted as recruits too, but no matter the test score they normally did need to fit a certain height and weight requirement. This kind of makes sense. Think back to your marching band days- remember sitting in the stands, watching other bands and playing rousing games of "spot the mini-marcher"? Yeah, we'd be doing that throughout every movie.

Here's an example of how agile the stormtrooper suit really is. (The guy on the subway is totally checking him out)