Saturday Night Showcase> Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles

Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Robert Heinlen’s Starship Troopers and Paul Verhoeven’s film are two very different creatures…or so I’ve heard. I only saw the movie recently at a Rifftrax Live event and I’ve never read the book. I’ve seen reviews of two sequel movies and a video game and they didn’t live up to either the book or first movie. There were also two TV series based on the franchise, one an anime in Japan (where animes tend to come from) and the subject of tonight’s showcase, Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, a computer animated series originally airing as part of the syndicated BKN (Bohbot Kids Network) programming block.

Roughnecks follows the same squad but with some big differences from other material. The point-of-view character is Higgins, an embedded reporter who seems to be narrating his journal or memoirs or something. Verhoeven was the executive producer but the tone is more serious, as the show was meant for somewhat older kids (the violence was toned down but didn’t shy away from death) but is a more serous war story, rather than Heinlen’s political commentary or Verhoeven’s more action-based story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TBugM7PdpY

I’m not sure why the intro says “Starship Troopers: The Series” but even Hulu’s page (in cooperation with Sony’s Crackle site) uses the correct name.

UPDATE: 9/22/2023> Hulu stopped allowing embeds years ago. Throwback Toons has just started posting the series to their official YouTube channel.  Still using “The Series” in their intros instead of Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles.

So what hurt the show? For me it was the fact that only a few episodes aired before it hit reruns, so I thought the show was already in reruns. Turns out from my research that they didn’t have all of the episodes done. This seems to happen a lot lately. Foundation Imaging, who did the animation for this show (as well as the original Max Steel and the effects for Babylon 5, among other works), had to get help from other studios and even then they had the rerun problem and had to produce three clip shows just to make the run time, leaving four episodes unfinished. Some stations also screwed up the order, and each week was a separate campaign that followed the Roughnecks’s evolution as characters.

My local channel aired it between 9 or 10 o’clock but some channels aired it around 7, which is dumb for a show not geared to little kids, but older kids who probably aren’t up yet. Apparently Sci-Fi (or SyFy but I never heard of that version of the network showing it) tried to air it, but didn’t go through proper channels and Sony pulled it. While the show has a cult following it never had the chance to get a proper audience, which is too bad.

The series was collected on VHS and DVD, combining the weekly campaigns into a series of movies. There are two box sets released. The one I bought was really bare-bones, no extra features that came with the individual sets (which were collected into its own box set) and that goes for $75 today.  On Hulu you can find the series in the original half-hour format. It’s a good series and worth a watch whether you liked the book, movie, or other versions or not.