Johnny Rico

theaters and director Paul Verhoeven turns a space war into the happiest fascist nightmare ever broadcast.

Casper Van Dien's Johnny Rico joins the mobile infantry, where citizenship is a prize, pain is instruction, and death becomes a recruiting opportunity.

When the Federation declares war on the arachnids, square-jawed adventure keeps breaking for propaganda broadcasts.

Children stomp insects while adults applaud.

Angered by this news, author Robert Heinlein took a break from the manuscript he was already working on to write Starship Troopers in just a few weeks.

Starship Troopers follows Juan Johnny Rico, who signs up for the military almost by accident.

We follow him through basic training, where he learns all sorts of combat, witnesses flogging and execution, and learns to use the high-tech suits that will be his bread and butter.

He eventually moves on to his first combat assignment and then officer training.

Oh, yeah.

Good old Johnny Rico.

He's been on the show a lot, but...

I guess I gotta give it to Kraken by half a star.

okay hi everybody and welcome to we're still here babe today's guest is an actor whose career has taken him everywhere from cult sci-fi classics to big hollywood films television and producing Casper Van Dien first became a household name as Johnny Rico in Starship Troopers, a role that's become one of the most beloved cult films of the 90s.

Fans also know him from Tarzan and the Lost City, Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, my favorite, Beverly Hills 90210, One Life to Live, and more recently projects like Alita Battle, Angel and Wednesday.

And we actually met a few years ago, but this is our first chance to really, really sit down and have a conversation.

He goes, listen, go drink some coffee or something.

You're too, like, too gruff in the morning.

I'd be too gruff in the morning, so he'd be like, hey, I'm Johnny Rico.

Remember, you're a kid, and at the end of the movie, then you go to your normal...

So even after Starship Troopers, occasionally I would go really high in my acting because I was like, oh, shit, I'm going to lose this job because I have not a high voice.

I don't even know what else that guy has done.

Listen, when the dude is listed as Rico from Starship Troopers, just like number one hit, what else are you going to do? Ride the wave, right? Mm-hmm.

But he's a hard working actor, it seems like.

Yeah,

yeah

um But yeah, it's fun overall.

What I don't care for in this series is the affinity for whitewashing Juan Rico, Carmencita Ibanez, and Dizzy Flores.

And this, to be fair, this anime completely skips over Dizzy and invites a man called Greg.

... and Casper Van Dien was in the comments.

And he was like, "Welcome to Rico's Roughnecks." And I was like, "Oh my God, Mark, look, dude."

Dude, that is so cool.

[laughs]

Johnny Rico is all in our comments.

So that was pretty cool, dude.

So we got Rico, and we got M. Bison.

I would've framed that if I were you.

As Tom Russell's article makes clear, very few novels have cast as long and heavy a shadow over a genre as this one.

It traces the journey of Johnny Rico through the mobile infantry.

It is an unavoidable text in this discussion, and we must approach Heinlein's ideological framework with strict objective analysis, precisely as the source material does.

Right.

We started with the raw desperation of recruits, looking at Andrew Grayson just trying to get a hot meal and escape poverty in terms of enlistment.

And John Perry trading his golden years and his natural mortality for a combat-engineered body in Old Man's War.

We examined the intense structural philosophical indoctrination of Johnny Rico in the classrooms of Starship Troopers.

And the heartbreaking tactical weaponization of a child's empathy in Ender's Game.

... and just like, how? I love it.

Um, do you think at the very end of the movie, basically considering everybody else died, do you think that Johnny Rico and Carmen get together? 'Cause they are not romantic at the end, but they're both alive and both other potential sexual partners have been murdered in this movie or by bugs.

Uh, do you think that they get together?

Do you think he's still rich?

Dizzy had to die.

But Dizzy's not like a slut though.

Dizzy just like is in love with Johnny Rico.

Oh yeah, but I think the movie's portrayal of her is that.