“Wish You Were Here” T-Shirt (Stormtroopers at Jabba’s Palace)

(Please excuse the wrinkles. :)) This shirt was sold at Target stores a few months ago. It features two stormtroopers in front of Jabba’s Palace on Tatooine. The “wish you were here” message is supposed to evoke a vacation snapshot or postcard. It’s kind of cute, but of course I can’t help wonder why they’re normal stormtroopers and not sandtroopers.

Putting stormtroopers in front of Jabba’s Palace is kind of an interesting juxtaposition because in the movies Jabba was basically independent and didn’t directly serve the Empire. We never saw any imperial agents (aside from bounty hunters like Boba Fett) in or around the palace. So in a way maybe it makes sense for stormtroopers to be posing in front of his palace, since it would have been a bit exotic to them. But maybe I’m reading too much into this…

In any case, I really think it would have worked better to use a non-white shirt. As it is, it looks like they were intending the white part of the transfer to blend in with the white of the shirt, but they’re slightly different colors. If they had used a darker color, it would’ve looked more like a snapshot. I saw this in my local Target twice and passed it up both times, since it was a little on the expensive side and didn’t quite work for me in terms of the design. In the end I got it for less than retail on eBay (probably from someone who found it on clearance).