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 :)
2 comments:
I love AstroBoy...not to mention tons of Tezuka's other creations. I run Tezuka-Club on DeviantArt. :P There are lots of examples of Astro doing his best to fight without killing his robot kind. It's one of my favorite things about the story is how Tezuka touches the topic of "racism" through robots and what could quite possibly be a real issue in the future. The best example in the 2003 version I can remember at the moment is the two episodes of Astro's fight with Pluto(The episodes are named, The Rise of Pluto, and, The Fall of Acheron). There's a manga named Pluto based the robot he fights in these episodes. I own the entire english production of the 2003 AstroBoy cartoon. Astro sounds adorable in spanish. Unfortunately they cut a lot of stuff for American audiences despite consulting Americans for what might make white American mothers have the proverbial cow. There's a petition somewhere to bring the japanese uncut version to dvd for us Americans who are less squeamish. :P I happily watched Adult Swim when they played the 60's version. I have yet to watch the 80's remake unfortunately. I was hesitant, but I eventually watched the Imagi movie AstroBoy and was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't as bad as I thought. I could go on and on about Tetsuwan Atomu, but I think I've typed enough.
Wow, you did type plenty (and then some :D)! Of course you love AstroBoy! I didn't know that you run Tezuka-Club on DA. That's great! :)
Alyssa and I have the 2003 AstroBoy collection as well. We gotta try watching it from the beginning and watch the episodes that weren't aired on U.S. television. As for the 1960s AstroBoy, I want to write another related post or posts for Cybernetic Dreams in the future. Whew, there's going to be too much AstroBoy to watch :D
Thank you for your rich comments, SonikkuKitten, and I'll look out for those episodes when I get to them (I think a likely at-home AstroBoy marathon might have to be arranged).
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