They are obsessed devotees of this TV show, that comic book or movie, people so enamored with the fantasy that they dress up as their favorite characters and role-play, in costume, in public — Vulcans and Romulans and Sand People, oh my.

You see them at movie premieres, at fan conventions, any place the subculture we call “fanboys” gathers.

But the fanboys and girls all know that you can dab on the perfect shade of green or twirl your hair into the grandest Princess Leia twist: Nobody will give you a second look when the phalanx in white and black — the Star Wars stormtroopers — march in.

“You get characters from every anime movie or TV show under the sun” at conventions like MegaCon or FX,” says Rick Stafford, Clone Trooper TC 7425, from Orlando. “When we show up, everybody turns and goes, `I have got to get a picture with you!’ ”

Stafford, 37, is a personal trainer and dive master at Disney by day. But on weekends, he suits up. So does Ismael “Esh” Velazquez, 31, who teaches digital media at Valencia Community College.

Role-playing fans such as these have long been ripe for mockery, a view aspiring filmmaker Jay Thompson of Greensboro, N.C., says he shared when he first encountered them. “They seemed to be just average, run of the mill sci-fi geeks,” Thompson says. They were children of the ’80s, like himself. They grew up on the Star Wars movies.

“From the moment in the first [1977] film where these guys bust through the door into Princess Leia’s spaceship, they all said, `Man, I have got to get me a suit like that!’ ” Thompson says, laughing.

But Thompson figured out, quickly, that these were geeks with connections. They knew how to get their hands on the means and molds to make the plastic armor. As Thompson started to film and follow stormtroopers around, he realized that they had the nodding approval of copyright-crazy LucasFilms, producer of the movies.

And the troopers themselves were organized. Since 1997, the “Fighting 501st Legion” has been a recognized part of the Star Wars universe, a worldwide club with several thousand men and women with stormtrooper gear.

But they were more than a club of like-minded Star Wars “geeks.” Thompson realized that the 501st Legion, a group founded in 1997 by Albin Johnson in Columbia, S.C., were shock troopers with a mission. That’s how Stafford found them and how he came to join the Fighting 501st, to wear the armor of an Imperial stormtrooper.

A dark side of life

On a weekend in late March of 2005, passers-by might have wondered just what was going on at Baldwin-Fairchild Funeral Home in Orlando. Scores of stormtroopers, Death Star flag officers and Boba Fett look-alikes milled around the chapel on Lake Ivanhoe.

Rick Stafford’s son, Christian, was 8 years old. He had inherited his father’s love for “everything and anything to do with Star Wars,” his father says. “Toys, Legos, lightsabers, all of it.” But Christian had leukemia. Rick had seen troopers at Disney’s Star Wars weekends and had wanted to hire them to come visit his son in the hospital, “maybe take him out of this awful reality he was living in and into this fantasy world he loved, just for a little while.”