When I was either eight or nine years old, my father introduced me and my sister to an old Japanese anime series called Astroboy, a robot boy with emotions who tries to promote co-existence between robots and humans while fighting the evil robots. My dad had VHS tapes of some of the episodes. He used to watch it when he was a kid. He wanted to share it with us, and right away we loved it. He knew we would enjoy it because it was from Osamu Tezuka, the same creator for Unico. Unico was the very first taste of Japanese anime I had, maybe at age 5. But I’m rambling now…
It was so fascinating that this Astroboy kid was a robot who displayed emotions, and back then I wasn’t so conscious to the idea that sometimes he had to fight against his own kind. It would not be that the “evil” robot was evil; its creator had built it for sinister intentions, so it is not the robot’s fault that it is evil. Astroboy sometimes tried to fight the robot and defeat it without destroying it.
I need to find which episode is a good example of what I am talking about. It's been a while since I've watched anything Astroboy. Mabye YouTube has something? I may even need to watch the first few episodes of Astroboy again to find the example. And one of these days I'd like to sit my bottom down and watch the 2004 Astroboy series. In my opinion it is has a very different atmosphere from the black and white 1960s version. The music is very sci-fi too, and I believe the animation is beautiful and colorful.
For now, enjoy the intro to the U.S. 1960s Astroboy :)
