Toy Bender

If there’s one move that’s super awesome that doesn’t ever get the respect it deserves, it’s Starship Troopers. The friggen movie is balls out awesome. It’s got war, gore, acting and a story that’s so horrible that it transcends awful and enters the realm of genius. As an added bonus there’s boobies for no reason. Yeah, it’s pretty much the perfect movie. If I have to tell you that the film is based on the book of the same name by Robert A. Heinlein, then you need your nerd credentials ripped from you and then drummed out of the nerdcore. Starship Troopers the film has so far spawned two direct to DVD (or Blu-Ray) sequels and a short lived CGI cartoon series called Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles.

There were also toys based off the first Starship Troopers film back in 1997, but they didn’t last long, which makes perfect sense considering the toys were based on a film that was amazingly inappropriate for kids. The idea in itself lead to a popular parody video seen here:

The biggest shame is that I can’t find any real Starship Trooper toy commercials, so the parody video is the only one where you can see many of the toys in action.

Micromachines

It’s almost inconceivable to think of a toy vehicle line that wasn’t turned into a Micromachine in the 90s, especially if it started with “star.” You had Star Wars, Star Trek, and yes, even Starship Troopers Micromachines.

Action Fleet

One segment of Micromachines that I miss was the Action Fleet line, which produced a bunch of small sized vehicles that were large enough to have a lot of detail, yet small enough that you could collect quite a few of them without a problem. There were two notable entries for Starship Troopers in the Action Fleet line, the Dropship and the Plasma Bug.

The Warrior Bug got a particularly awesome, larger scale toy that had electronic features made that fetches a good amount on the collector’s market. Even if you hated all the other toys, this Warrior Bug is an appealing item for the discriminating Starship Troopers fan. It’s totally ballsome.

Action Figures

There were a few 3 3/4th scale Starship Troopers figures made, but not that many. The figures sported crazy names like Toxic Raider Ace Levy and Cyber Commando Sugar Watkins. Obviously, they barely had any resemblance to their movie counterparts and didn’t have a lot of articulation. Those are pretty huge strikes against a line having any kind of value with collectors who were the only ones that were most likely to buy the figures. Why would kids care about them if they couldn’t see the movie?

It’s a shame that Starship Troopers toy line was basically wasted on the film. The CGI cartoon Roughnecks, which most people didn’t see due to horrible scheduling, would have made a much better toy line simply based on the amount of characters, vehicles, weapons, and bugs that appeared on the show and not in the film. Even better, Roughnecks was much safer for children, so they could have been more invested in the whole concept of Starship Troopers over an R-rated flick they couldn’t or shouldn’t see. The cartoon didn’t last and Starship Troopers has lived on in the straight to video sequels that most likely aren’t pulling in a whole lot of new fans. Until more people take interest in the Starship Troopers universe, I think it will be a long time before fans will again get the chance to purchase a wide variety of toys based on it.

Starship Trooper Toy Links:
Archive of Starship Troopers Toys
Action Fleet Starship Troopers Toys
Big Bad Toy Store’s Starship Trooper Section

*Images taken from scouring the internets. If you own one of these pictures and would like me to take it down, please let me know.

**This post was initially inspired by Poe Ghostal’s article on Topless Robot, “The Five Greatest Kid-Oriented Toylines Based on R-Rated Movies.”