Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles - The Pluto Campaign (Full Screen)

The animated series manages to explain something that the movie explained very poorly, and the book explained somewhat weakly: why have Mobile Infantry battling millions of bugs on the ground when you could just nuke them from orbit?

The movie's dumb explanation was to throw a knife at some guy's hand and say "The enemy cannot press the button if he cannot reach it." That made no sense and did not explain why tens of thousands of troopers were thrown into a fight with no artillery and only limited air support to fight an enemy that could have been killed with some helicopters spraying Raid.

The book's explanation was more nuanced, discussing the idea of responding appropriately to the threat and not wiping out an enemy that could eventually become an ally. This works as long as the enemy is not going to wipe out earth. But if humanity's very survival is at stake, there is no reason not to use nukes.

But the animated version has a bigger hurdle to jump, because it eventually becomes clear that the bugs intend to invade and completely conquer earth. So why don't the humans simply nuke every bug infestation that they find? The explanation is shown, rather than told. First, the humans do not really understand what kind of enemy they are dealing with and how extensive it is. That is evident in this first episode which takes place after the bugs have shown up on Pluto, destroyed numerous science stations, and been defeated in initial battles. At first the humans think that the bugs might be indigenous to Pluto, but soon they discover that they came from elsewhere. So the humans cannot simply nuke all the bugs because they do not know where the bugs are or where they are coming from. Second, the humans need to gather information about the bugs more than they need to kill bugs. So over the next several campaigns they start to learn how the bugs travel from planet to planet, how they reproduce, how they control their armies, how they adapt, etc. In fact, by the later campaigns it is much more common for the humans to simply nuke the bugs rather than engage in ground combat. Third, it is clear that simply firing large weapons doesn't kill all the bugs. Some are deeply buried and it requires troopers to track them down and kill them. All of this makes a heck of a lot more sense than the movie's simplicity.

Overall, I enjoyed the stories and the DVDs, but there were some annoying things about them. For starters, there is no commentary track on this first DVD. However, when you get to the commentary track on the second DVD (The Hydora Campaign) the filmmakers talk as if they _had_ produced a commentary track for the first DVD, which seemed rather strange to me. I suspect that the distributor for the first DVD did not have much faith in it and kept the extras to a minimum, but then started adding them to the later DVDs once they realized that sales were good. Another annoyance is that the DVD boxes are not numbered, so it is not easy to figure out which one to watch first, second, third and so on.

Most of the characters are fleshed out fairly well. However, Higgins, the young reporter with the group, became a bit of a running joke late in the series. He was always getting knocked out or missing the action. This was deliberate by the writers, but it really became rather silly.

Officially, the series was aimed at kids and so they followed some rules that are not quite sensible. For instance, the troopers could only kill bugs, not humans, and even then they could not ambush the bugs but had to be engaging in defensive battles. The narrator often tells us how badly the war is going, but that seems rather silly as we never see anybody get killed. In addition, the guns could not seem gun-like because the filmmakers were concerned that some kid might pick up a gun and shoot somebody after watching their cartoon.

However, although ostensibly aimed at kids, it is clear that the series was actually intended for adults. There is a sophisticated story arc that most kids would have trouble following, and bad things happen to a number of major characters--one appears to go insane, another is paralyzed, a third turns into a bug, and a fourth is killed. This is not Spongebob Squarepants.

I thought that the storytelling was weakest for The Hydora Campaign but got stronger by the middle and later episodes. In addition, the troopers' tactics also made a lot more sense. They started using diversions and feints and some really clever solutions to fighting the bugs. And their weapons were also more sophisticated than what we saw at first. They were still missing some obvious weapons, like radar-guided gatling guns, but the combat eventually started to make sense.

All in all, I enjoyed this series much more than I did the movie.