In 1997 Paul Verhoeven directed Starship Troopers based on the Robert A. Heinlein science fiction novel of the same name. It didn't exactly bust the box office wide open but it did ok and more importantly, it quickly gathered up a sizable cult following. A few years later, a spin off animated TV series appeared as Roughnecks – The Starship Troopers Chronicles that intended to stay closer to the source material over eight 5 episode story arcs. Sadly the series was never finished but at least it seems to be finding a little bit of new life on DVD thanks to the continuing releases of Sony through Columbia/Tri-Star.

The title episode of this release is Trackers. Basically, when it starts of, a whole lot of Federation Starships are hunting down the Bug Queen. She's the baddest of the bad and they need to take her down because she miraculously escaped during the Klendathu missions.

While all this is going down, the soldiers discover that Higgins just got dumped by a girlfriend that they never even knew her had. Rico and a few of his other teammates are a little peeved that Higgins seems to know everything about them, while they're totally in the dark about his past.

When the crew on the Valley Forge eventually finds down the transport Bug that the Queen used to escape in, they blow it up but their hopes are dashed when the start to hear reports of other Transport Bugs being destroyed by other ships in the area. It's then that Carl realizes they've been outsmarted and that they were decoy ships to throw them off the Queen's real path and that she is in fact actually heading to Earth. They track down the real ship but are unable to destroy it and some of the Roughnecks are recruited to sneak into the ship and assassinate the Queen Bug once and for all by blowing up the ship from the inside out.

Rendered completely through digital computer animation, the series plays itself straight and is a pretty solid sci-fi/action hybrid. The look and feel of the show is in tune with what was created visually for the film and the animation team has done a great job bringing in some nice atmosphere and mood via cinematic lighting and shadows.

The only real flaw is that sometimes the voice acting seems a little out of key with what's going on on the screen but that's probably more a personal bias than a technical slant. That minor issue aside, this is a great series that deserved to find a wider audience.

Video:

The episodes were composed and broadcast at 1.33.1 and that's how we get them on this DVD. Colors look nice but there is quite a bit of shimmering present as well as some noticeable compression artifacts. It's not a terrible transfer, but seeing as it was digitally rendered in the first place, I figured it would look better than it does here. At least the colors are reproduced quite nicely and the blacks remain fairly stable.