Short answers, pulled from the story.
The original Astro Boy anime series premiered on Fuji TV on New Year's Day 1963, a Tuesday. It ran for four seasons and 193 episodes, with the final episode airing on New Year's Eve 1966.
Osamu Tezuka created Astro Boy, adapting his own manga for television. He described the series' central themes as anti-war sentiment, the preservation of nature, and the fight against discrimination, tracing all three to his childhood experience of World War II's devastation.
The first American episode of Astro Boy aired on the 7th of September 1963. NBC Enterprises had announced the initial syndication package of fifty-two episodes on the 12th of March 1963, with producer Fred Ladd involved in settling on the English title.
Only 104 of the original 193 Japanese episodes reached American television. The main reasons were that the series remained in black and white as American sets were switching to color, and many storylines were considered too violent or depressing for a mainstream audience.
The original English-language masters were destroyed in 1975 following the bankruptcy of Tezuka's production company, Mushi Productions. Right Stuf International later restored the series for DVD release by combining the best surviving voice track elements with picture quality from the original Japanese negatives.
The 1963 Astro Boy series was remade twice. A second anime, called New Mighty Atom in Japan, appeared in the 1980s, and a third series, called Astro Boy: Mighty Atom in Japan, followed in 2003. All three series are called Astro Boy in English.