Star Wars: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Darth Vader's Suit

8. The Empire's Budget Limitations Hampered The Suit

Darth Vader Mask
Lucasfilm

After Anakin was left feeling a bit crispy on Mustafar, he was rescued by Emperor Palpatine, who had him fitted with the suit in order to save his life.

But the droids responsible for this fitting didn't do a perfect job. They used a lesser alloy during Vader's leg prosthesis, some of the suit's linkages were faulty, and on the whole, the process was quite outdated, having been used to create the many-limbed General Grievous years earlier.

As a result, Vader was required to undergo regular maintenance of his suit, something that required his long-term reliance on Imperial medical staff.

And - quite weirdly - it was actually thought that the Empire was undergoing budgetary problems, which were to blame for those aforementioned suit limitations. Those Death Stars are expensive!

Additionally - according to the Legends novel Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader - Vader himself also speculated that Palpatine may have deliberately ensured the armour was restrictive, in order to stop his new apprentice rebelling against him.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!