Astro Boy (1963 TV series)

• 1. Introduction

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  On New Year's Day 1963, Astro Boy made its debut on Fuji TV in Japan. The series ran for four seasons and 193 episodes, with the final episode airing on New Year's Eve 1966. At its height, forty percent of Japanese people who had access to a television were watching it. The show went on to become the first Japanese animated series broadcast in the United States. It reached American screens the same year it launched in Japan. What drew so many viewers to a program about a small robot boy? What did its creator actually want to say? Osamu Tezuka, who drew the manga that became the series, would give a specific answer to that second question. He had grown up witnessing the devastation of World War II, and that experience never left his work.

• 2. Tezuka's Wartime Vision

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  The three themes Osamu Tezuka identified as central to Astro Boy were anti-war sentiment, the preservation of nature, and the fight against discrimination. Astro's stated wish throughout the series was to remain peaceful rather than fight.

  The manga, published in Japan under the title Mighty Atom, was rewritten more than ten times over its publication run. The rewrites were not simple cuts. Each time the story had to fit a different magazine's size or duration constraints, Tezuka redrew entire panels and sections rather than trim them. This makes it difficult to identify any single definitive version of the source material.

  When Tezuka adapted the manga for television, further changes were required. The story was simplified to reach the broader, younger audience the show was targeting. The anime's central question, whether robots deserved to be treated as humans rather than discarded as objects, was one Tezuka carried into the television version intact.

• 3. Grief and Robot Rights

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  Doctor Umataro Tenma, head of Japan's Ministry of Science, lost his only son to a traffic accident. Out of grief, he devoted the Ministry's full resources to building a robot in the boy's image. The result was the most advanced robot anyone had ever created. But Tenma grew frustrated with a single limitation: the robot could not grow physically the way a human child would. In a fit of rage, he sold it to a circus owner known as the Great Cacciatore, then resigned his post and vanished.

  In the circus, the robot was renamed Astro and forced to compete in gladiator-style fighting tournaments. His nature ran toward peace rather than combat. When Professor Ochanomizu, Tenma's successor at the Ministry of Science, encountered Astro, he recognized how advanced the robot was. After a fire broke out during a circus show, Astro saved the owner. With Ochanomizu's intervention and the passage of the Law of Robotic Rights, Astro was freed. The law had granted robots the right to lead lives equal to those of humans. Among the robots, Ochanomizu was regarded as a savior figure for his kindness toward them; he became a surrogate father to Astro.

  Ochanomizu built a full robot family for Astro: a mother, a father, a younger sister named Uran, and a prototype older brother called Cobalt. Astro's capabilities included rocket-powered flight, superhuman endurance, and one hundred thousand horsepower of strength. In the final episode, which aired only in Japan, Astro sacrificed himself to save the Earth. He carried a device to normalize the sun, which had begun threatening all life on the planet. In one rare later appearance, Dr. Tenma came out of hiding to upgrade Astro's systems to a maximum output of one million horsepower.

• 4. Outpacing the Manga

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  The television company producing Astro Boy needed fifty-two new episodes delivered every year. At that pace, the animated series quickly moved beyond the manga it was based on. Tezuka was left with no choice but to create original stories, ones that had never appeared in any printed edition of Mighty Atom.

  In 1964, one year into the series' run, a feature-length film was released in Japanese theaters. It was assembled from three selected episodes: episode 46 ("The Robot Spaceship"), episode 56 ("Earth Defense Army"), and episode 71 ("The Last Day of Earth"). The final two of those three were filmed and produced in color.

  Fukushima Television had been carrying the series since April 1963, in a region where no Fuji TV affiliate had yet been established. At the time of production, Fuji TV operated only a handful of stations in Japan's larger cities. The UHF band that would allow more affiliates had not yet opened, and the Fuji Network System was not yet fully configured. The series reached most of the country through whatever commercial stations were available, building its audience one independent broadcaster at a time.

• 5. The American Edit

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  On the 12th of March 1963, NBC Enterprises announced it would begin syndicating fifty-two episodes of Astro Boy in the United States. The first of those episodes aired on the 7th of September 1963. Producer Fred Ladd took part in discussions over what the English title should be, and the team settled on "Astro Boy" for American audiences.

  Frederik L. Schodt, who had created the English version of the original comic, said the American character names were "cleverly" changed to suit American tastes. The 104 episodes that reached the United States came from the first 124 Japanese episodes and were reordered from their original sequence.

  Tezuka found some of the adaptation decisions troubling. American producers refused to broadcast an episode showing a dog being operated on, judging it too cruel for audiences. Tezuka objected to this as hypocrisy. In a manga story, he noted that non-Japanese cultures kill and eat animals in ways he himself described as grotesque. He also pointed out that white people in Africa shot animals for sport. Meanwhile, rumors circulated in England that Japanese people ate dogs, which Tezuka characterized as false.

  On the 16th of September 1964, NBC announced a second round of syndication covering an additional fifty-two episodes. The final episode in that batch aired on the 4th of June 1965. The series continued in repeats until NBC withdrew it in the early 1970s. By then, only 104 of the original 193 Japanese episodes had reached American screens. The series was still in black and white at a time when most American televisions were switching to color. Many storylines were also judged too violent or depressing for a mainstream American audience. IGN would eventually name the series the eighty-sixth best animated series ever made, citing it as the first popular anime television series.

• 6. Survival and Remaking

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  In February 2004, Cinefantastique listed the 1963 Astro Boy series among its ten essential animations. The magazine cited "dark themes and Tezuka's use of sci-fi as a conduit to address such issues as war and intolerance."

  From 2007 to 2009, Cartoon Network broadcast the NBC syndicated edition as part of its Adult Swim programming block. Only the first fifty-two episodes were aired. Right Stuf International and Madman Entertainment eventually released the entire dubbed series on DVD, spread across two box sets. The Right Stuf edition included episodes 1, 20, 34, 56, and 193 in Japanese with English subtitles. It also contained a behind-the-scenes film and an interview with Fred Ladd.

  The original English-language masters had been destroyed in 1975, following the bankruptcy of Tezuka's production company, Mushi Productions. Right Stuf located the best surviving voice track elements and combined them with picture quality from the original Japanese negatives.

  The 1963 series was remade twice. A second anime, known in Japan as New Mighty Atom, appeared in the 1980s. A third series followed in 2003, known in Japan as Astro Boy: Mighty Atom. In English, all three were called Astro Boy. The original series was set in the year 2013, half a century ahead of its own premiere.