The following is our second excerpt from How Star Wars Conquered the Universe (Basic Books, 2014).

Star Wars was the last thing on Albin Johnson’s mind on a grey, wet summer day in 1994 when he skidded into the back of a van in Columbia, South Carolina. The other guy didn’t seem to have any damage, but Johnson got out to check anyway. His hood had popped up, and his grille had broken. Let’s call it even, said the van driver. Johnson, relieved, stepped between the cars to put his hood down.

That’s when a third vehicle suddenly appeared, hydroplaned into the back of Johnson’s car, and all but sliced him in two.

His surgeon told Johnson he had lost nearly all of the tendons in his left leg and was facing amputation; his exact words, according to Johnson, were “we’re going to throw your leg in a meat bucket.” Johnson fired him.

He underwent twenty operations on the leg and then spent a year in a wheelchair while getting muscles removed, skin grafted on, and bones from elsewhere in his body chipped up and injected into the injury. At one point he nearly bled to death on the operating table.

A year later, left with what he called a “Frankenstein foot,” Johnson finally elected for amputation and prosthesis. Dark days followed, and even his then- wife Beverly giving birth to their first daughter couldn’t quite pull him out of the funk. “I kind of hid in my house and felt like a freak,” Johnson says.

Johnson kept his workaday job at Circuit City — “putting my psych degree to good use,” he says — and it was there in late 1996 that a coworker, Tom Crews (yes, his real name), made a mission of cheering Johnson up. They talked about common interests: karate, rock and roll. Then they talked about Star Wars. Hey, did Johnson know the movies were coming back to theaters in 1997, in so-called Special Editions?

Johnson brightened. “All we talked about that day was that opening scene where the Stormtroopers come tearing through the door of the Tantive IV [the blockade runner shown at the start of Star Wars]. We couldn’t let go of that concept.”

Memories came flooding back. Star Wars memories.

Johnson had been born in poverty in the Ozarks in 1969. In the 1970s, his parents were called to a Pentecostal ministry in the Carolinas. His Sunday school teacher told him George Lucas had signed a deal with the devil and made his actors sign papers saying they were going to worship the Force. He went to see the first film twenty times anyway.

Every time he came out of the theater he would run along its brick wall, imagining the gaps between the bricks to be the Death Star trench, and himself the pilot in the X-wing. He would run it so fast, and so close into the trench, he would occasionally skid his head painfully against the bricks. No matter — it was worth it to be Luke Skywalker.

Johnson laments that he didn’t grow up to look anything like Luke, and then laughs: “Hey, at least we’re both amputees.” But then there are the space soldiers, the Stormtroopers pouring through the door in all that bright molded plastic. As he and Crews reminisced about Star Wars’ most numerous icons, they realized that so long as the detailing on the suit was right, anybody could embody them.

When you’re a Stormtrooper, nobody knows you’re an amputee. You’re supposed to blend in, to be expendable — perfect for a shy, self-conscious guy.

501st Legion founder Albin Johnson in less self-conscious times, with a detachment of what he calls "Trooper groupies." Image: Albin Johnson

Johnson became obsessed with the costume as “a passport to the Star Wars universe.” He started sketching out ideas for how he could build his own, while Crews searched the nascent web, betting that he could find a truly authentic Stormtrooper costume — that is, one that matched the on-screen version in every detail, whether Lucasfilm-licensed or not — in time for the Special Editions.

This was the pre-Google age, but somehow he stumbled on a Usenet posting in which a guy claimed to be selling an original movie prop costume in an “estate sale” for $2,000. The vendor was actually trying to avoid getting sued by Lucasfilm for selling a reproduction suit without its say-so, without Lucas getting a cut. This was extremely risky, and such reproductions were rare. “It was like uncovering a 747 jet in caveman times,” Johnson recalls.

Johnson cajoled Beverly, the real breadwinner of the family, into buying the suit in exchange for the next ten years’ worth of Christmas presents. Soon, awkward plastic molding parts arrived in the mail. He nervously constructed them with Dremel and glue gun. It was horrible: the helmet hung loosely; the suit was constricting. He felt ridiculous: a plastic spaceman with a metal leg. He had no line of sight in that helmet. No wonder Stormtroopers were such poor marksmen.

Still, Johnson wore it to his local one-screen theater for showings of The Empire Strikes Back Special Edition. Theatergoers poked him and laughed. “I had one guy after another saying, ‘You loser, don’t you wish you could get laid?,’” Johnson recalls.

But then Crews found his own costume online—another pricey, hard-to- construct model—and joined Johnson a few weeks later for the Return of the Jedi screening. This time, patrons looked awestruck and a little afraid as the pair confidently patrolled the lobby. “That’s when the switch really flipped,” Johnson says. “The more Stormtroopers, the better it looks. I resolved that somehow, in my lifetime, I would get as many as ten Stormtroopers together in one place. That’s how big I was thinking.”

The pair built a website and posted pictures of their exploits—at comic shops, State Fairs, and preschool graduation, whatever gigs they could get. Johnson wrote captions about a couple of Troopers who were always falling afoul of Darth Vader. He gave his trooper the name TK-210, a denizen of detention block 2551 on the Death Star.

Within weeks, four more Stormtroopers emailed him with pictures of their own. This was before Facebook, before flash mobs, before the golden age of geekdom dawned in the twenty-first century. The Internet had barely become a gathering place for Star Wars fans, let alone Stormtrooper costume owners. Yet somehow, here they were.

Johnson now pictured a whole Stormtrooper legion. He recalled several times back in grade school where he’d tried to organize some kind of juvenile army out of his friends; after Star Wars came out, he dubbed one attempt the Order of the Space Knights. Clearly, that name wouldn’t work for Stormtroopers.

He tried to think of names that recalled his dad’s World War II fighter pilot squadron — “something zippy, something cool” — added some alliteration, and came up with the Fightin’ 501st. He wrote a backstory that solved a question he’d formed watching the movies: How come Darth Vader always seems to have a detachment of Stormtroopers at his elbow whenever he needs them? The 501st, he decided, was a shadow legion, off the books, always ready: Vader’s Fist.

It was, friends agreed, a pretty neat idea. They helped him hand out leaf- lets at conventions: "Are you loyal? Hardworking? Fully expendable? Join the Imperial 501st!"

In 2002, Johnson mustered roughly 150 Stormtrooper costumers in Indianapolis at Celebration II, the second official Star Wars convention, and offered their services to a skeptical Lucasfilm to let the 501st help out as crowd-control when the event’s security proved woefully inadequate for the thirty thousand attendees.

Lucasfilm was won over by the tireless, hyper-organized troopers, and started to use the 501st as volunteers for all its events. Lucasfilm licensees followed suit. If you’ve ever been to one of the Star Wars Days held at dozens of baseball stadiums across the United States, if you’ve seen multiple Stormtroopers, or Darth Vader or Boba Fett at a store, a movie theater or a mall, you’ve almost certainly been staring at the forces of the 501st.

501st members on patrol at the Oakland Athletics 'Star Wars Day' in October 2013. Image: Chris Taylor

Johnson’s idea didn’t stop at America’s shores, either. The 501st Legion is now recognized as one of the largest costuming organizations in the world. It has active members in forty-seven countries on five continents, divided into 67 local garrisons and twenty-nine outposts (those units that comprise fewer than twenty-five members). More than 20 percent of the troops are female.

The 501st absorbed a once-independent UK garrison and established a garrison near Paris, though some French Stormtroopers have gone their own way with the 59eme legion. The Germans, meanwhile, have a garrison consisting of five squads that are all large enough to be garrisons on their own — but are loath to undergo any kind of de-unification.

501st garrisons around the world. Image: 501st.com

The 501st elects local and legion-wide commanding officers every year. To Johnson’s dismay, COs are imposing ever-more stringent membership requirements — your Stormtrooper belt must contain six pouches, not four— meaning that even so-called “authentic” Lucasfilm-licensed suits sold online won’t get you in the club. Most members make their own, hammering away at styrene sheets on vacuforming tables, sinking hundreds of dollars and hours into a single costume.

Even with such a major barrier to entry, the 501st Legion is starting to stretch the limits of its name. Roman legions, world history’s largest, rarely had more than 5,000 members; Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with a legion of 3,500. The 501st, at the time of this writing, numbers 6,583 screen-accurate, active Stormtroopers. That, if you’re keeping score, is 6,573 more troops than Johnson first anticipated.

Despite substantial economic pressure, the 501st has not succumbed to any kind of black market of armor making. Nor does it encourage the purchase of even Lucasfilm-licensed Stormtrooper replica suits. “Why would you want to spend $800 [for an incorrect costume] on eBay,” says Golden Gate Garrison CO Ed daSilva, “when you could spend $400 on parts and be part of a club that sets standards for high quality?”

Some members sell pieces here and there, but “we stick to a simple rule of selling costumes at-cost, so there is no temptation to commercialize this,” says Johnson. He describes the legion as “an eclectic and bohemian collective that trades tips and works to make good armor.” There’s money at stake, but it’s not for them. The 501st raised $262,329 for charity in 2013, roughly double the amount raised the previous year.

Just as importantly for them, Johnson and Crews’s creation has reached that galaxy far, far away. In 2004 came the first official Star Wars novel to feature the 501st, written by famed franchise author Timothy Zahn — who happened to have first encountered Johnson and his crew at a convention, kicking back with a cooler full of beers after a long day of trooping. Johnson held onto sobriety long enough to explain the concept of the 501st. Zahn nodded thoughtfully, went away, and promptly wrote the novel Survivor’s Quest, in which a squad from the 501st costarred with Luke Skywalker.

Even greater honors were to follow. The next year, George Lucas officially included the legion in his final Star Wars movie, Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. A detachment of Clone Troopers, the predecessors of Stormtroopers, follow the newly minted Darth Vader into the Jedi Temple as he prepares to massacre its inhabitants (including a Jedi youngling played by Lucas' own son, Jett). In the script, they are designated the 501st Legion.

But Johnson had no inkling of this until a member of his Tokyo Garrison mailed him a Star Wars action figure prior to the release of Episode III. Amid the Japanese script on the box was a number: 501. Hasbro has since churned out an impressive five million of these plastic 501st members. Ill-informed fans started to claim that Johnson was copying Lucas’s name, rather than the other way around.

The matter was settled in 2007, when George Lucas was made grand marshall of the Tournament of Roses Parade (associated with the Rose Bowl) in Pasadena. Lucas asked for the 501st by name and paid to fly hundreds of its troops from around the world to march five and a half miles with his float. Here they were, finally assembled, the space soldiers, going through actual army drills with actual drill sergeants.

Lucas addressed them the night before the parade: “The big invasion is in a few days,” he said, deadpan. “I don’t expect all of you to make it back. But that’s okay, because Stormtroopers are expendable.” The legion roared its approval.

George Lucas and the 501st Legion. Playing Darth Vader is then-CO Mark Fordham.

After a breather following the punishing march, the troopers put their buckets—as they call their helmets—back on and posed for photos with Lucas. Lucasfilm’s Steve Sansweet insisted on introducing Lucas and Johnson, two shy men who prefer to run things from behind the scenes.

“Good work on all of this,” said Lucas.

“This is all you!” was all Johnson managed to sputter before the man some fans call the Maker.

“No,” said Lucas. “I made Star Wars.” He gestured at the rows of white-armored troopers, standing stiffly at attention and carrying the flags of their garrisons. “You made this. I’m very proud of it.”

It was enough to make a guy’s head so big it would never again fit in a bucket. But even after that unparalleled moment of validation, Johnson retains a sense of perspective.

“Y’all, if we’re not having fun, this is just a drag,” he tells his COs. “We’re plastic spacemen. If anybody in the club is getting too serious, we’ll throw out that tagline. 'We're plastic spacemen, right?' 'Yep, we’re plastic spacemen.’”