Caffeinated Clint
While the film brass have their own plans (and quite frankly, those plans blow worse than a toothy hooker), the writer of 1997‘s “Starship Troopers” says he and the original band are looking at getting back together for a TV series – and they’re hoping that includes Casper Van Dien back on lead guitar.
Speaking with HN Entertainment recently, Neumeier was asked whether or not the cast of the original Paul Verhoeven directed film – including Van Dien, Jake Busey, Denise Richards and Patrick Muldoon – might be allowed to come back and play for some sort of reboot in the near future.
“Well, I think they can. I don’t want to jinx anything, but we are talking about trying to do a television show that is based on that idea. I’ve written all sorts of things with Casper [Van Dien] now as Johnny Rico and it’s a gas to write him because he gives you that character. He gives you more than you think, as soon as he shows up, the tone comes with him a little bit. I think it’s because he’s ridiculously hand-some, he’s got this boyish can-do attitude, which is what Johnny Rico is, and a lot of the brand comes with him.”
That project, unfortunately, isn’t as half as solidified as the other “Starship Troopers” project – a straight-up PG-13 movie reboot that won’t feature any of the original cast, let alone writers.
Neumeier says : “Well, I have mixed feelings about it [the reboot] because I think that what we did with the first Starship is almost not repeatable in a way…I based the structure of Starship Troopers when I was writing it, the structure of WWII propaganda films that the studios made between 1941 and 1944. We don’t really talk about those movies anymore, but that had a very particular structure and they were made during a conflict and they didn’t have an end-point as with Starship ends they’ll keep fighting.”
”I can imagine you could do a new one that was a more serious version of the book without the political commentary, but I don’t know if that interests me that much. The spectacle of the giant creatures and the ridiculous bloodshed, all that stuff, I don’t know if in this world of CG where you can do all that stuff pretty easily seeing a bunch of creatures fighting might not interesting enough right now, for me. But other people might like it.”
”I’m not sure, their idea is as I understood at a certain point was they said to kind of do An Officer and The Gentleman, Johnny Rico as the Officer and The Gentlemen version of a sci-fi movie. So, maybe you could do that a romantic picture about kids coming up together in the service and one of them be-coming an officer and all of that means, you know. It’s really not what Heinlein’s about, but that’s okay I can imagine you could do that. I’m not sure who goes to see that movie though.”
That film, boasting a script by “Baywatch” movie scribes Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, is housed at Columbia Pictures.
While not a grand slam when it was released at the box office twenty years back, “Starship Troopers” did go on to become quite the cult hit – it’s success paving the way for a few direct-to-video sequels and many-a-shared gif of Dina Meyer.
