The subtitles are of rather poor quality, and include some really poor grammar, and even some minor profanity. Little boys ought not to say "damn you", but Atom does it regularly when speaking of the bad guys.
Episode 1: "The Birth of Astro Boy"
After already having viewed the English dub of this, I was pleasantly surprised to see some differences.
Ricard Strauss' "Thus Spake Zarathustra" (better known as the theme to S. Kubrik's '2001'
is the musical accompaniment to Astroboy's birth (awakening), while the dub version produced for English speakers uses Franz Liszt's "Le Prelude". But, more than that there are quite a few scenes that were edited out of the dubbed version. Moreover, while the subtitles call him 'Phillip', one can clearly hear his name is 'Tobio' ('Toby' for the dub), just as the sub for his dog is 'John', but the audio (and the English television dub) is clearly 'Jump', or 'Jumpa'. Jump initially rejects him, probably because he has no human scent. Although he has the form of a nine year-old boy, the robot Tobio is an infant, who must learn not only physical coordination, but manners also. His 100,000 horsepower does not help either. His behavior errors are too many for his creator/papa, who in his rage after a mistake sends him away.
:angry: One defect of the English television version (also on VHS) is there was no explanation about his flashing eyes incident that occurred in this episode. But here, it is clear, he has a psychic link to 'Atlas' (dub), or is it 'Artilus' (sub, which I believe is simply a translation error), a twin robot that the bad guys have created using stolen plans for Astroboy. In the English television version, Atlas does not even appear in until tenth episode, leaving viewers stumped regarding Atom's flashing eyes incident, that caused him to loose consciousness and go 'sleepwalking'. Another defect, is that the scene with a dying Tobio asking his papa san to make the robot in his image, and name it after him is completely missing. The DVD has it all.
Counting the opening and closing credits, the first episode ran 24:07, about the same running time as the taped dub version.
