Bad Guys Doing Good!
First, let’s make sure you’re in the right place. The 501st Legion focuses on recreating screen-accurate costumes of villains in the Star Wars saga. While many of our members are avid costumers in general and may moonlight as Ghostbusters, predators, superheroes, or all of the above, the scope and focus of the 501st is limited to the Star Wars “bad guys.”
If you’re interested in costuming as a “good guy” from the Star Wars saga, the club you’re probably looking for is our “sister” group, the Rebel Legion. Among dozens of other costumes, they cover farmboys, princesses, smugglers, wookiees, golden droids, x-wing pilots, commandos, and crazy old wizards. If you want to go that route, the Rebel Legion has tons of great resources for you… but do keep the Empire in mind in the future. We‘re always looking for double agents!
The 501st also only focuses on villains that have official visual references in the Star Wars films and other published materials. There are other clubs, like the Mandalorian Mercenaries and The Dark Empire, which have looser costuming guidelines and allow for creative, original interpretations of Star Wars characters. If you want to create an original character, perhaps one of those clubs is just the one you’re looking for. Here in the 501st Legion, though, all of our costumes come from officially-established Lucasfilm sources, including the films, television shows, video games, and graphic novels.
For now, since the 501st Legion deals with the canonical bad guys, let’s move forward under the assumption that you want to build a screen-accurate costume for the Galactic Empire!