The Starship Troopers Anime Series Fans Need To Discover, Stream Right Now

By the same token, if you think you’re going to enjoy the Starship Troopers anime by virtue of the fact that you enjoyed the movie, you may be in for a rude awakening. Paul Verhoeven admitted to only reading two chapters of the novel before getting bored with it and doing his own thing.

Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers was a satirical take on the source material that was intended to undermine the concepts of fascism and militarism while the anime that predated it by a decade explored the same themes at face-value and portrayed the military in a more positive light.

In other words, the Starship Troopers film you’re familiar with does share some familiar beats that are found in the anime, but Verhoeven takes a considerable amount of creative liberties in his adaptation.

Fans of the original novel have celebrate the Starship Troopers anime as the most faithful adaptation of the source material that they’ve seen so far. The story centers on Johnnie Rico, a high school football player who decides to join the military when learns that his crush, Carmencita, will join upon graduation. When Johnnie breaks the news to his parents, his father, Emilio, reveals to him that his company, Rico Food Company, has been fulfilling food supply orders for the Federation in the from of front-line military rations.

Despite his father’s warning of a war that’s either rapidly approaching or already underway, Johnnie says goodbye to his parents and begins his training.

In the Starship Troopers anime, Johnnie works his way through boot camp, preparing for war against an unknown enemy. He struggles with the power armors that are depicted in the novel but absent from the film, but quickly finds himself preparing for battle. He continues training after finding out that the first wave of alien attacks on Earth decimated his hometown, killing his mother.

Unlike the Starship Troopers anime, the 1997 live-action adaptation didn’t utilize the power armors that were featured prominently in the original novel. While you’ll notice some similarities between characterization and general plot points, Verhoeven’s version starts to deviate from the source material because he didn’t like how the novel glorified armed conflict. Verhoeven disagreed with the book’s premise due to his upbringing in the German-occupied Netherlands when he was a child.

While there are obvious thematic differences between the Starship Troopers anime and feature film, they’re both worthy intellectual properties in their own right. What we’d suggest doing is watching the entire miniseries on YouTube and then watching the movie. You can watch the entire run in under three hours, and if you find that it’s too intense, you can follow it with Verhoeven’s version to take the edge off.