Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

A full decade before Verhoeven got his mitts on Robert Heinlein's classic milSF novel, it was adapted into a six episode anime miniseries back in 1988. Which I had never heard of until a few weeks ago. “Uchu no senshi” (Soldiers of the universe) was released on home video in Japan back in the era of VHS and laserdisk, has never been reissued on DVD, and AFAIK, has never been published with English subtitles. However, thanks to the wonderful ability of the internet to act as the world's biggest bootleg video store, I have now seen the miniseries with fan-made subtitles. And, while it's not great, it's… interesting.

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As an adaptation, the anime departs rather radically from the source material. As a story, it's not bad but not particularly good either. The most interesting thing about it, for me, was seeing all the ways that the departures the movie took from the source material tended to come from slavish copying of the anime's departures.