Made of metal, but all heart

The simple fact is, either you get Astro Boy or you don’t.

If you get him, you were probably of an age to have watched cartoons in the 1960s. And if you were watching cartoons back then and happened to see the diminutive boy robot with jet feet and the strength of “100,000 horsepower,” you were probably hooked.

“It used to give me goose bumps,” says Jane Kostopoulos, 42, who watched the show with her twin sister, Georgette. “It was as though he was a living thing.”

Especially for Georgette: “We never missed an episode. I had a crush on him.”

And who wouldn’t, with that spiked hair and those big round eyes that have now become a staple of anime. Plus, he could shoot bullets out of his rear end.

“Astro Boy,” one of the first anime, was the first Japanese cartoon to hit American airwaves, and like the anime of today, it had story lines that weren’t exactly Disney.

“I’d be watching a couple of minutes of ‘Astro Boy,’ and it looked like typical run-of-the-mill cartoon action and then go off in a totally different direction,” says Raymond Tucker, 43, a Web designer in Greensboro, N.C. “For kids it was totally hypnotic; it’s like ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ ”

Yet Astro Boy was also fallible. He could be wrong, and he questioned what he was and where he belonged. He faced discrimination and wondered why humans treated robots so badly. Like a metal Pinocchio, he tried to understand what it meant to be a boy. And sometimes his friends died, at least in the original version.

“He was so powerful, but he didn’t always win,” says Raquel Dominguez, 35, who first watched the show in Spanish in Puerto Rico. “He could make mistakes just like you and me. That makes you connect with him.”

And want to be him, or at least his special friend.

When she was 4 years old, says Dominguez, who now lives in Anniston, Ala., her mother put her in front of the TV when “Astro Boy” was on. “I said, ‘Momma, that’s my boyfriend,’ and I went to the TV and kissed it.”

Meanwhile, the Kostopoulos sisters, who live in Red Hook, N.Y., liked the noise, a sort of scraping sound, that Astro Boy made when he used his feet instead of his jets. “We used to wear corduroy pants to sound like Astro Boy,” Georgette says. And buy Astro Boy gum for the temporary tattoos in the package.

Now history has caught up with Astro Boy, and all those 6-year-olds who braved chilly Halloween nights in black Speedos, a belt and red boots. The story was set in the future, and the date of Astro Boy’s “birth” was April 7, 2003. Which means, among the cognoscenti, birthday parties complete with screenings of the old shows and parades. In L.A., Astro Boy gets not only a birthday cake, but also a museum exhibition devoted to the anime art form he helped create.

Breaking new ground

To truly understand Astro Boy, you have to know about his creation and his creator.

Osamu Tezuka, widely consider to be the father of anime and a god of manga (comics), had a career that spanned 40 years, starting with his first published comic in 1946. A trained medical doctor who preferred drawing, Tezuka introduced Tetsuwan Atomu (Mighty Atom) as a manga character in the early 1950s. The boy robot was so popular that it became the first comic to be animated for Japanese TV. That series was dubbed and became “Astro Boy” in the United States. Although Tezuka, who died in 1989, is credited with producing more than 150,000 pages of comics, award-winning films and an estimated 800 characters, Astro Boy is by far his most famous. His second most famous in America, “Kimba, the White Lion,” also was a cartoon here.

But it was Astro Boy that set the standard of what was to come, both in manga and anime. Tezuka was one of the first to use cinematic techniques such as close-ups and odd angles in his comic strips. Pictures didn’t just illustrate the dialogue; they drove the action. And some unusual action it was.

In the Tezuka comic, Astro Boy is created after Tobio, the son of a scientist, is killed in a car accident. The grieving father builds a boy robot in his son’s image. But when the scientist realizes the boy will never grow up, will never develop as a real child, he gets angry and abuses Astro and then sells him to a circus. Astro is rescued from the circus by a kindly professor. But he lives in a society where robots were once slaves and still face prejudice.

Astro Boy clearly resembles Pinocchio, but another source for Tezuka was a 1921 play about robots with emotions called “R.U.R.” (Rossum’s Universal Robots) by Czech author Karel Capek. “Tezuka read that play as a child,” says Maureen Donovan, a Japanese studies associate professor at Ohio State University in Columbus. The play, she says, left a lasting mark on his imagination.

So did war. As a young adult, Tezuka witnessed bombed-out cities and people struggling to survive. “Astro Boy was created in the rubble of World War II,” Donovan says.

Like other manga in postwar Japan, the Tetsuwan Atomu comics, which ran both before and after the cartoon series, can at times be downright grim. But most Americans got their only exposure to Astro Boy from the TV series. Until last year, when Dark Horse Comics started publishing the original comics in book form, the Astro Boy strips weren’t available in English. And although it was far from a typical superhero cartoon, the “Astro Boy” show was a lot tamer than manga Astro Boy.

“It was a half-hour devoted to a serious story line that had action and movement that appealed to kids but also had ideas. It was about something. It made us think,” says Brian Camp, 49, programming director of CUNY-TV, the cable television station of City University of New York. “At one point he tells a human character, ‘I believe you’re a good man, but you’ve fallen in with bad men and that makes you a weak man.’ Where else did you hear dialogue like that in a cartoon back then?”

While many episodes dealt with typical Saturday morning fare -- good robots battling bad robots -- others had much more philosophical themes. In one, a teacher tries to get Astro Boy and her other robot pupils to appreciate art and beauty. “It’s a treatise on how art and natural beauty are perceived by robots and humans,” Camp says. And a continuing story line is the lack of respect humans give robots.

“The stories are not frivolous, superficial cartoons,” Donovan says. “These have a depth, of looking at what it is to be human, what is life. That is the type of issue just below the surface.”

Those big themes, however, were not the main focus for those who decided to put the Japanese series on American TV. “We always played it for laughs,” says Fred Ladd, who dubbed and adapted the show for the U.S. market. “We did not play it for any social significance. But I thoroughly believe that Tezuka was a visionary.”

Tezuka’s philosophy survived in translation, but the violence in the Japanese version had to be tamed for American TV.

“Cultural differences became a major thing to reckon with,” Ladd says. Scenes were never transposed or the basic story changed, he says, but violence was edited down for a Saturday morning audience. In the U.S., for example, networks’ standards and practices departments would frown on a real death in a kids’ cartoon.

“In ‘Astro Boy,’ no one ever died,” Ladd says. If the original episode showed a death, that character was made unconscious in the U.S. version. And it wasn’t just violence that caused problems. One episode that couldn’t be edited enough to get on American TV was called “Christ’s Eyeballs,” in which a fugitive hides in a church and scratches a message on the eyes of a statue of Jesus.

Birthday boy

Of the 193 original “Astro Boy” episodes made in Japan, 104 aired in the U.S., Ladd says. The show was never on network TV, but it was syndicated by NBC Enterprises, a business unit of that network. The show’s heyday lasted from 1963 to about 1968; after that, demand for black-and-white cartoons fell off. “Astro Boy” was revived in color in the 1980s, but that version wasn’t picked up by U.S. TV. (It’s now available on video, however.)

So unless you’re a fan, Astro Boy has been pretty much off the radar for the last couple of decades. His birthday, though, could change that.

Monday will be practically a national holiday in Japan. Astro Boy exhibits, parades and parties are planned. A commemorative gold coin ($1,250 a pop) has been issued by Sierra Leone. Tokyo train stations are playing the theme song from the cartoons. And there’s a countdown clock ticking away with Astro Boy sleeping in a glass case, ready to wake up when the clock hits zero. In addition, Tezuka Productions and Sony are launching a new TV series in Japan.

Here in Los Angeles, the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center is having an Astro Boy and postwar anime and manga exhibit, co-curated by Ladd, through June 1. It features works from Tezuka Productions, including animation cels, old drawings and manuscripts. Anime scenes will be shown throughout the exhibit and on May 4, “Expedition to Mars,” an “Astro Boy” episode that was thought lost, will get a special screening. For hard-core collectors, there will be vendor fairs today and May 10-11 selling anime and manga goods. Also today, the cultural center will host a birthday party for Astro Boy with cake and costumed characters.

The boy robot deserves no less.

“Astro Boy ruled,” says Georgette Kostopoulos. “He was the best cartoon ever.”

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‘Postwar Japanese Anime/Manga’

When: Tuesdays-Fridays, noon-5 p.m.; Saturdays-

Sundays, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.

Where: Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, 244 S. San Pedro St., Los Angeles

Ends: June 1

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 628-2725