The Leaning Tower of Damocles: Radio Lovely Angels

On my old blog (from 2006 - 07, R.I.P.), I reported on the FM Osaka radio series, Lovely Angel: Yuri & Kei, which was run in 26 weekly episodes during the last quarter of 2006, both in broadcast and Internet streaming modes. The premise (as far as I've been able to make out from Japanese blogs), is that Kei and Yuri are singers from Japan who come individually to the U.S., meet each other, and decide to form a duo, Lovely Angel. They travel across America on the transcontinental highway, Route 66*, and somehow end up assisting in some sort of investigation being undertaken by the FBI. Each episode takes place in a city or town named in the lyrics of the much-covered song from 1946, "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66".

*presumably not much later than June 1985, when the highway was officially decommissioned (it was opened in 1926 -- the interstate highway before the Interstate Highway System was legislated in 1956); by the 1990s, many stretches on this nearly 2500-mile road were no longer being maintained

illustration by Gunboy

♪ "It winds from Chicago to L.A. ..."

Not long after I had to suspend my site activities, FM Osaka ran a second series in 12 weekly installments of two linked six-week stories, written by Takachiho Haruka (the Lovely Angel series was not). The series was called Daatipea91: Kunoichi**, which placed Yuri and Kei as eighteen-year-old ninjas-in-training in the Japan of 1791, where they become entangled in a political intrigue of the period, as well as a major culinary event in Nagoya, which included a visit from the French epicure and gourmet Brillat-Savarin***.

This series first ran in broadcast and streaming during the last quarter of 2007, and was repeated during the spring of 2009.

**a sort of double play-on-words: 91 MHz is the station frequency for FM Osaka, and the words ku and ichi are the numbers 'nine' and 'one' (the word kunoichi [a female ninja] is itself a kind of pun, in that three kanji and kana characters pronounced ku, no, and ichi comprise the three strokes for writing the character for 'woman')

***while he had departed France around this time of the post-Revolutionary turmoil, visiting Holland and the fledgling United States, it doesn't appear that he actually made it to Japan... [Nagoya, incidentally, is Takachiho's hometown.]

illustration by Rulia046
(who also did the art for the DPF print novels)

Both series were voice-acted by Horie Yui† (Yuri) and Minagawa Junko (Kei), both of whom have extensive credentials in anime and elsewhere. Takachiho had a hand in selecting them in auditions for their roles.

†Horie-san wanted to become a voice actor in part from being a fan of the 1985 DP television series.