>L/M R only ran for a half-season; none of the original
>showrunners were involved, it had only the most tenuous of connections
>to Fly Girls to begin with, and it turns out watching Redstone
>and Vostok yell at each other for 22 minutes actually gets really dull
>really fast if they can't get into the sky and blow each other
>up like Spitfire and 109 used to.

Yes, Ratio was disappointing; even more disappointing is that the other missile-themed Fly Girls spinoff, which did involve the original creators, didn't get picked up. The pilot was never released, either, but unauthorized bootlegs of it turn up at cons from time to time. (Well, the same unauthorized bootleg - the color registration is always wonky in the same way and there's always the same huge, obnoxious time code.)

It was called, perhaps inevitably, Missile Girls, and the premise was similar to Ratio's in that it chronicled the adventures of two missiles derived from concepts pioneered by the Germans during World War II, one American, one Soviet. The difference is that they weren't ballistic missiles, they were cruise missiles, and so their adventures involved a lot of low-altitude zooming around, narrow escapes from anti-missile defenses, and so forth.

In fairness, the premise of Missile Girls probably didn't have legs much longer than Ratio's, since it's not as if cruise missiles actually fight each other either, but the flight scenes in the pilot were a lot more interesting than the ballistic missile action in Ratio, and the characters were much more engaging. Poor Snark, she just tries so hard, you know? And submarine-launched Pyatyorka's conquest of her fear of the ocean depths would've been good for a several-episode arc if the series had been picked up. They could at least have made a decent six-episode OVA out of it. Ah, well. The road not taken.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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