Starship Troopers (OVA)

Starship Troopers
Cover of official handbook on the series showing Johnny Rico inside the power armor design from the OVA.
宇宙の戦士 (Uchū no Senshi)
Genre	Mecha anime, Real Robot, Military Science Fiction, Space opera
Original video animation
Directed by	Tetsuro Amino
Studio	Sunrise, Bandai Visual
Released	October 25, 1988 – December 17, 1988
Episodes	6

Starship Troopers (宇宙の戦士, Uchū no Senshi, lit. Soldiers of Space) is a six part anime OVA produced by Sunrise/Bandai Visual and released in 1988. It is based on the book Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein that was published in 1959.

Production

This production is considered the "most faithful" to the original novel's plot, despite the fact that many liberties were taken with the characters and the original book's themes. For instance, Rico, a Filipino in the novel, is a blonde White Argentine in the OVA. The main character in Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film Starship Troopers is the same ethnicity as in the OVA series, despite the two productions being otherwise unrelated.

However, unlike the 1997 film edition the most prominent link the anime has to the original book are the inclusion of powered armor and drop pods that were absent in the film—though even in this regard there are many liberties taken in their function, usage and appearance. For example, the principal weapons of the Mobile Infantry in the novel were flame throwers, missile launchers sometimes firing small-scale tactical nukes, and backpack-mounted grenade launchers as well as numerous utilities. By contrast, the OVA features a variety of machine guns as primary armaments, with flamethrowers and the aforementioned missile launchers acting as supplementary weapons. Another difference is that the alien antagonists of the OVA were bipedal polyp-like creatures possessing tentacles and integrated biological weapons capable firing globules of a sticky explosive compound at high muzzle velocity. The creatures were never named in the OVA, nor were their intentions or social structure analyzed, though individual creatures were observed combining to form colony structures. This stands in stark contrast to the tool-using pseudo-arachnids of the novel.

Mecha Design

Kazutaka Miyatake of Studio Nue originally designed the mobile infantry powered armors in the OVA for a Japanese edition of the novel in the early eighties. A mecha based on this design also appears on the DAICON III and IV Opening Animations from 1981 and 1983, a few years before the OVA was released.

Episode list

• 1. Johnny
• 2. Hendrick
• 3. Maria
• 4. Greg
• 5. Cherenkov
• 6. Carmencita

External links

• Starship Troopers (anime) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia
• Starship Troopers at Gears Online
• Uchu No Senshi at the IMDB
• http://www.trooperpx.com/AFS/AFS01.html
• http://www.trooperpx.com/AFS/AFS02.html