"Aren't you a little short for a Stormtrooper?"

Height of Jeremy Bullock (OT Boba Fett): 6'1"
Databank height of Jango Fett and all clonetroopers: 183 cm, a bit over 6"
Another cited height for Jango Fett: 178 cm, about 5'10"
Height of Ewan McGregor/Alec Guinness: around 5'10"
Height of Mark Hamill: 5'9"
Height of Temeura Morrison: around 5'7"-5'8"

As you see, there's a bit of a problem here

*rubs hands together, speculates*

a) Going with what the Databank says. Jango is five inches taller than he appears in the movies (where he's clearly significantly shorter than Obi-Wan) This has the amusing side effect of invalidating pretty much every Saxtonite argument ever.

b) The databank is wrong, all the clones are Morrison's height and Luke Skywalker is actually a little tall for a stormtrooper

c) The (even unaltered) Fett genome has the potential to grow to 6'+, but Jango was hideously malnourished as a child.

d) The height difference is due to unspecified environmental factors/perfect Kaminoan upbringing and exercise.

Discuss.

 

if you want to talk about short people jaina's only 4' 10" ,humans in the star wars universe appers to be a bit shorter people on earth,and lfl has official heights for actors characters despite the actors actual size.

 

I like choice (a), just because it's funny and it's really going to piss certain people off...

I'll be back with more real feedback later, hopefully.

- Keralys

 

I also like choice "a"..

Im sure someone will somehow decide that this is all that idiot Traviss' fault and she should be shot.

 

I'm going with C, personally. Heck, maybe Jango used to smoke and it stunted his growth. It makes sense actually-the clones are grown perfectly, with all the right nutrients and stuff..

 

sabarte: As you see, there's a bit of a problem here

*rubs hands together, speculates*

Good catch!

Discuss.

Of course!

b) The databank is wrong, all the clones are Morrison's height and Luke Skywalker is actually a little tall for a stormtrooper

Hmm. It's worth looking at Luke's armour in ANH - his chest-plate comes down a lot closer to the belt than those of most stormies, covering about half his abdomen guard...

Of course, can we trust the movies at all?

a) Going with what the Databank says. Jango is five inches taller than he appears in the movies (where he's clearly significantly shorter than Obi-Wan) This has the amusing side effect of invalidating pretty much every Saxtonite argument ever.



c) The (even unaltered) Fett genome has the potential to grow to 6'+, but Jango was hideously malnourished as a child.

That works, too, though Jango being 6" is explicit, if C-canon...

I'd take (a.) or (c.), myself - I guess I've been working on the idea that within a "constructed" movie narrative, the original "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi"-style holos correspond to the real-life bluescreen footage, which means the people should be more-or-less accurate. And a 6" Jango in in-universe sources is easy enough to explain as an error based on all his clones being that height...

A few things it might be worth considering, though:

1.) The Kamino footage has to be "second-hand" for Artoo...
2.) Perhaps a "shorter" Jango helps establish subtle narrative nuance in terms of the inter-character dynamics in AotC...?
3.) Is the OT "Boba Fett" necessarily the Boba Fett of the Prequels? We're now in an odd situation with Lieutenant Sheckil, who walks like OT Boba and comes from Concord Dawn, but looks nothing like Tem Morrison - doubly odd, now that he's also demonstrably the spitting image of Captain Colton of the Tantive IV...

Did Alderaan have its own clones?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

For one, Leia was taunting Luke about his height and the fact that the armor didn't fit. There's a photo somewhere showing a bunch of stormies standing in a row, and they're all different heights. Luke seems to have picked one that was a bit taller than him.

Second of all, it's very easy, even likely, that the clones will have differing heights even from one another and especially from Jango. Height is based on a number of environmental factors (as you noted) as well as genetics. Identical twins-- the only clones around today-- aren't necessarily the same height.

 

Drat, I wish I'd thought of posting this topic. I've been aware of the Jango/Boba discrepancy since AotC.

 

You also have to consider that by the time of ANH not all stormtroopers were clones.

 

Yeah, that's the easy enough answer. Considering we know from TOTE that they're accepting recruits who presumably must meet certain physical standards (and likely height for an imposing physique as one of them)...

 

Most military forces have height requirements for certain positions, don't they? I always just assumed that to be accepted into stormtrooper training you had to be a certain height, and Luke didn't meet it. Perhaps the clone genome was altered to produce more physically imposing specimens?

 

I'm mostly commenting on the fact that the databank has Jango, Boba, and the clones at identical heights, and that this is weird. Environment definitely should have an effect. I can also think of clone positions where that kind of height would be a negative, particularly pilot positions.

 

I know. I brought that up on the Film forum a while ago, I recall. Silly me.

 

This is assuming that the starfighters aren't designed for taller people, of course, and if most of the clones are, say, 6' tall, then they ought to have equipment designed to accommodate that.

Clones grew up on Kamino in a more controlled environment than Jango presumably did, and thus there wouldn't be that much height variance. (Heck, me and my sisters vary by less than an inch and we're only sisters, not clones. With the same nutrition, same medical facilities, same exercises, etc. and same DNA there wouldn't be much difference between the clone heights.) Stormtroopers are a different story, but I read (in the nebulous book-place called "somewhere") that stormtroopers were around 1.8m tall - maybe they were selected for it, and those that didn't meet the requirement had to go into other branches?

As far as the difference between the databank... maybe Jango shrunk? Donno.

 

Jango was wounded pretty seriously several times in his life, if I recall Open Seasons (never actually bought it). He aslo did slave labor for awhile, which was presumably physically damaging work (think coal mining). As such, he could have been shorter than his body allowed him to be.

Though the "Saxton's head explode!" argument is kinda neat

 

ROTFLOL! Good catch, good catch.

My vote is that the newer, non-Jango models are taller...

TC

 

Two things that I'm surprised haven't been brought up.

1) Do the growth acceleration techniques used by Kaminoans affect the overall height of clones?

2) Following the Clone Revolution on Kamino (that according to BFII never officially happened), the Empire began cloning from different sources on different planets, presumably (since Jango is dead) different Gene donors, etc. Perhaps the average Stormtrooper on the Death Star (excluding the all-Jango 501st, whom I refuse to believe make up even a sizable minority on the DS) comes from a taller source, perhaps a 6'2" OR 6'3" donor.

 

what if Leia didn't actually mean that he was shorter than a regular stormie that she was used to seeing -- after all, she's shorter than all of them, and she's sitting down. perhaps she is more referring to the fact that this man is clearly no stormtrooper by the way he holds himself and it's her way to being cute and telling him so. what better way to get a dig in on a man than to tell him he's short. although if she's quick enough to realize that this man is not a stormtrooper because he doesn't carry himself like one, that most likely this man might be trying to rescue her. but perhaps she's still a little groggy from napping on a hard slab.

 

Hasn't Jaina been listed as 1.49 meters tall since she was 14? I think they've just never bothered to update her height since then. If I can find my copy of The Essential Guide to Characters (at the time it was published, only the first two Young Jedi Knights books had been released), I'll be able to confirm that.

 

Also, 1.49m is closer to 4'11" than 4'10".

/nitpick

Not out of the question, but it seems like something that should have come up in the books more than it did.

 

Mr. Ewok, sir, you never fail to give me a headache.

 

I am 4' 10.5 inches & stopped growing when I was 15. Therefore, it is possible for Jaina to be 4' 11 inches & not have grown since she was 14.

 

Please explain why a claim by the databank would be superior to the visuals of the movie.


Concerning Mr.Fett's height one of the side-effects of advancing age is the shrinking of the body. Up to ten centimeters, if memory serves correct. So lets say the clones grow taller by three centimeters because of better nourishment and stable living-conditions (Jango joined the Mandalorians at age ten or twelve) and Jango loses two centimeters because of age and spending a few years as a slave. Voila.

 

The Kaminoans may have made slight genetic modifications as well related to the height. We know they made other modifications.

But, the easiest and most "common sense" answer is probably "C". Since Bullock is over 6", this implies that Boba Fett is at least 6", and he is an unaltered clone. Thus, Jango probably did not reach his full phenotypical potential for height.

 

Problem with that is that the clones, from what I've seen, are Jango's height. Which makes it rather more of a continuity issue.

Maybe Jango always wanted to be taller and made the cloners sneak it in to Boba?