Astro Boy Basics

Astro Boy

10/23/2009 New Astro Boy CG movie opens, ranked 6th in the US ($7 million gross opening weekend) but #1 in China. Reviews:

News: The 1980 and 2003 TV series are now legally streaming free online.

Astro Boy Encyclopedia Project!
Over this year we are drastically expanding our Astro Boy coverage, adding character pages, issue indexes for all manga and anime editions, story pages summarizing each original issue and discussing the animated and alternate adaptations of each, and more! This project will grow gradually, so keep an eye out for frequent new additions!

ASTRO BOY PAGES:
(or just scroll down for the basics)

OTHER ASTRO BOY PAGES ON THE NET:

THE WORLD OF ASTRO BOY
Astro Boy, or Tetsuwan Atom as he is called in Japan, is a robot boy, resembling a human child of about the age of ten, but with a very powerful robotic body. He lives in a near future (indeed, in the original story he was supposed to have been created in 2003) in which robotic technology has become so advanced that it is threatening to radically transform human culture, both through eliminating many jobs which has led to social upheaval, and by presenting mankind with robots so sophisticated that they have to be recognized as another sentient species. In the manga in particular, Tezuka uses these robots to explore issues of prejudice and racial intolerance, as the robots and humans who support them face a fierce political struggle to secure robot rights, while humans fearful of the change offer fierce and often-violent resistance. Possessing the world's most sophisticated and human-like computer brain, Astro serves as a bridge between humans and robots, fighting to defend both races and establish peace and friendship between them. Many of Astro’s adventures are simple science-fiction, including exploration of Mars, encounters with aliens, assisting with new sophisticated computers and , and saving humans from all sorts of dangers. In between these adventures, though, are other more political ones, including Astro serving as the bodyguard for the first robot who tries to register to vote, or for world's first legally elected robot president, and Astro negotiating with robot revolutionaries, who try to lead the robots to rise up in revolt against their human oppressors. The work the finest example of Tezuka's ability to write literature which introduces children to important and serious life issues (see the Zero Men series page for more discussion of this theme), as well as his ability to write a hero so noble that even readers who have for years preferred antiheros and charismatic villains find ourselves, for once, rooting for the good guy.