Saturday Night Showcase> Starship Troopers: The Anime

My experience with the Starship Troopers franchise is seeing part of the CG animated series (a previous Saturday Night Showcase) and the Rifftrax Live in theaters for the first movie (here’s a link to the studio version for purchase, but you’ll need a copy of the movie due to rights issues). It just wasn’t a franchise I got into, but I do want to finish watching the TV series I mentioned. There have been a bunch of movies and I think series set in the universe as put together by the first movie, but I guess it isn’t a proper representation of the original 1959 Robert Heinlein novel. Dave Huber, contributing to Bleeding Fool, recently posted an article about wanting a proper adaptation with the reports of a potential reboot movie by Neil Blomkamp. I’m not really familiar with his works, or the novel, so I can’t tell you if this is a good idea or not, but Huber didn’t seem happy about it.

This made me think of a version I was told at the time, via the anime fan magazine Protoculture Addicts, that was closer to the books according to the article. A six part anime produced by Sunrise, the anime studio known for the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise and thus used to doing anti-war series with robots, was produced as an “original video animation (OVA)”, Japan’s version of a direct-to-video animated production. Never really saw it before but since Huber’s article made me think of it I went to check it out. I just couldn’t get into it for the same reason I didn’t get into the movie. Oddly enjoyed the series more, but the terrible air schedule in syndication meant I missed when they finally aired new episodes. It’s available online and I own one of the DVD sets, so someday I should finish it.

I bring you the fan translated anime because there has never been an official release of the 1988 OVA, even when the 1990s movies came out. You’d think someone would have run for the rights immediately before the movie hit the theaters. This is a playlist (unless I’m forced to relink the video) so you can see all six episodes right through. Enjoy.