Starship Troopers (OVA)

Starship Troopers (宇宙の戦士) 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. 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, an Asian Filipino in the novel, is a blonde White Argentine in the OVA. Interestingly, the main character's ethnicity in the OVA series has more in common with the Paul Verhoeven's 1997 film Starship Troopers than the source material—this despite their productions being wholly unrelated and having nearly a decade of difference.

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.

Kazutaka Miyatake of Studio Nue originally designed the powered suits in the OVA for the Japanese edition of the novel in the early '80s.

Episode list
1. Johnny 2. Hendrick 3. Maria

4. Greg 5. Cherenkov 6. Carmencita