How did you discover Astro Boy?

[Astro Forever]

Are you saying astroforever that the madman release of the original astroboy was a limited or low volume release?

I think they were limited to 10 000 at first, but it was so popular that they may have made more available, or maybe they didn't need to, who knows. I really have no idea how things work in Australia, so I can't tell, but I know that the extras DVD isn't available for sale by itself, so if you intend to buy the full series, it may be better to buy the boxset instead of buying them separately.

Wow, Astro forever is happy by the look of all the smiles, I think you hit her very interests of Astro boy Rauli .

[astro-me]

Being probably the youngest here, and since Astro Boy was made into an anime more than 40 years ago, I just read about astro Boy in a magazine, and I thought it was cool, so I checked it out.

[MightyAstro]

The first time I ever saw Astroboy was when the 80's series aired on Australian television in the 80's when I was a young teenager. Or maybe I was only about 11 or 12.
But anyway I think I remember catching it right from the very beginning and I enjoyed the science fiction fantasy it provided me with.

I made some comparisons with Superman and to my mind Skunk and Atlas were very comparable to Superman's arch enemies Lex Luthor and Brainiac.
There were also shades of comparison to the 6 Million Dollar Man, which was a tv series about a super crime fighting robot modelled upon the body of a police detective who was killed in the line of duty. The robot cost six million bucks to make hence he was known as the $6000000 man.

I laughed at all the characters. Daddy Walrus, Uran and even Dr. Elefun had some hilarious comedy moments about them. Dr. Boynton sort of reminded me of a rooster due to the shape of his hair, nose and beard. But my favourite character by far was perhaps the pig-tailed girl named Mindy. She was such a cutie-pie.

[Dragonrider1227]

My story's a little different. While most of you seemed to have gotten into it as children watching it on TV, I got into it as an adult around 2003 when the Manga arrived in the US. I saw it sitting on a shelf and actually laughed a bit at first because I knew Astro Boy as some "silly cartoon my dad used to watch" but when I read on the back of the book that Astro Boy and his creator was such a huge influence in modern manga and anime, I decided I ought to at least give it a shot so I can honestly say I've seen it before making fun of it but when I started reading, I discovered that many of the stories weren't "silly" or "campy" as I expected a comic from the 50s and 60s to be, that it could get dark, bittersweet, and even darn right depressing sometimes. Not to mention, the character Astro Boy just proved to be just too darn cute and loveable. and then something I didn't expect happened. I got hooked XD

[AstroBoyGF]

my story gose like this:
i was watching tv with my mom and my little brother and it was the WB and i was at that time called the aftertoon show. and this thing came up and it was "ASTRO BOY!!" (2003 version)and i didn't know what it was. and at this time i ws really into 3 other differnt animes. and so as we were watching it my mother starts shooting off names like" omg theres dr. elefant and omg theres astro boy!!" she sounded pretty excited. and was like "who are these people and mom who r u talking 2?" then she said " " honey see the man with the big nose and with white hair?" i said " yeah..." "thats dr. elefant!!" " and see that kid with the red boots and the spikey black hair and underwhere? (yes she said underwhere)" and i replied, " uh-huh.." "thats astro boy!" and as i rember looking at the tv and thinking ;(wow...he's cute!!) then my mother got me the 1980's version of astro boy and she told me that she must have saw it when she was a kid in the 60's. after that(this was a dark page in my life) started to find out more and more about him. i found a world that i thought i would never expeted to come across. but, i started to put people where the charaters were. like my sensei is daddy walrus, my grampa is dr. elefant ect. then i started wondering..." who would i be...?" it didn't take that long to find out i was alot like astro boy! and i fell deeply in love with this charater!! and at that time the dark chapter my life, my step dad was acting like the 2003 dr. tenma! he made me so mad!! GRRRRRRRR! and my biological father was like the 1980's temna! and i could feel alot that astro feels and after i found out osamu tezuka i wanted to be come and animatior! and make animes like osamu tezuka did!! i wanna tech kids somthing while enjoing the art and the animation of the cartoons with laughter and sorrow and all the emetions that you can feel that touch young and old alike. even when i do become a famous animatior i'm always gonna think about osamu tezuka and think of my fave anime charater astro boy..... and now i'm hooked to astro boy!^^ my life stroy i really don't think u wanna know...

[Ataru Moroboshi]

My story's a little different. While most of you seemed to have gotten into it as children watching it on TV, I got into it as an adult around 2003 when the Manga arrived in the US. I saw it sitting on a shelf and actually laughed a bit at first because I knew Astro Boy as some "silly cartoon my dad used to watch" but when I read on the back of the book that Astro Boy and his creator was such a huge influence in modern manga and anime, I decided I ought to at least give it a shot so I can honestly say I've seen it before making fun of it but when I started reading, I discovered that many of the stories weren't "silly" or "campy" as I expected a comic from the 50s and 60s to be, that it could get dark, bittersweet, and even darn right depressing sometimes. Not to mention, the character Astro Boy just proved to be just too darn cute and loveable. and then something I didn't expect happened. I got hooked XD

XD I thought I was the only one who got hooked as an adult after years of thinking it was just ol' rubbish. That fanzine earned Astro my respect when I was about 14 and reading the manga earned my "fanboyship" when I was about 20. Now I'm a classic manga lover.

I'll take this opportunity to define myself as a manga fan: my fav manga is Dragon Ball (my first, my last & my everything on the manga world) and my fav anime is, as you may guess, Urusei Yatsura (I think the anime version is better than the manga). Other classic not-tezuka manga I love are Saint Seiya, City Hunter, Speed Racer, Ash-ta no Joe, Kimagure Orange Road, Slayers (relatively recent , but an undeniable classic), Crying Freeman, Captain Tsubasa, or Go Nagai's works among others. Of the actual mangas, I like Full Metal Alchemist, 20th Century Boys (I know it's finished, but anyway...), One Piece, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, Berserk and Crayon Shin Chan, among others, too... And I hate Naruto.

[Wolf]

The 80's series was my introduction of Astro Boy which I saw when I was a kid. It was when I rewatch the series from an adult perspective where I was able to comprehend and appreciate Astro Boy even more.

[Fauna]

My story is probably less graceful than everyone else's...

When I was tiny, I used to occasionally watch Astro on STV, the channel my parents both worked at (at the time). Around 1996, it just stopped running, and Astro receded to the back of my mind. I started to see Astro Boy stuff around a lot more in 2004-2005, and then, I pretty much dismissed it as "a cheezy robot fighting anime", a statement that still makes me feel guilty.
When I begun to work on a comic about a partially-robotic boy, I decided it would be a good idea to get into the Astro Boy manga before I subconciously rip it off. (This sounds dumb, but believe it or not, I completely copied Astro's origin without seeing the anime again.) In short, I would have never gotten into Tezuka's works if I hadn't been so concerned about plagiarism.

[jeffbert]

XD I thought I was the only one who got hooked as an adult after years of thinking it was just ol' rubbish. That fanzine earned Astro my respect when I was about 14 and reading the manga earned my "fanboyship" when I was about 20. Now I'm a classic manga lover.

I'll take this opportunity to define myself as a manga fan: my fav manga is Dragon Ball (my first, my last & my everything on the manga world) and my fav anime is, as you may guess, Urusei Yatsura (I think the anime version is better than the manga). Other classic not-tezuka manga I love are Saint Seiya, City Hunter, Speed Racer, Ash-ta no Joe, Kimagure Orange Road, Slayers (relatively recent , but an undeniable classic), Crying Freeman, Captain Tsubasa, or Go Nagai's works among others. Of the actual mangas, I like Full Metal Alchemist, 20th Century Boys (I know it's finished, but anyway...), One Piece, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, Berserk and Crayon Shin Chan, among others, too... And I hate Naruto.

I also, enjoyed U.Y. & intend on seeing it again sometime, once I knock down the number of titles on my queue to about 300. I also like Inuyasha & Ranma. I never heard of Ash-ta no Joe, Kimagure Orange Road, Crying Freeman, or Captain Tsubasa, though. Overall, at this time my main interest is in humanoid robots, esp. those that begin to develop true human characterists, & those whose stories are similar to Atom's story (origin, that is; being a replacement for a deceased loved one).

I did like Naruto until recently, but it has become silly as deadly enemies spend more time exchanging insults and bragging about their 'powers' than fighting. For anyone interested, the anime is available with very limited commercial interruptions at http://www.hulu.com/naruto.

[Ataru Moroboshi]

To clear things: This Ash-ta no Joe isn't actually the real title of the manga: there's supposed to an "I" in the empty space, but the text machine censors the name because without without the "A"s, appears a word that means "Excrement"! In fact, this boxing manga has things in common in Astroboy: when Astroboy was dreaded as a "establishment symbol" in the late 60s, the rebel boxer Joe Yabuki was considered as his "anti-establishment" contender, and had at the time far more fans than Astro. When Yabuki's rival Tooru Rikiishi died, a funeral was held... And 800 mourners filled the building of the editorial publishing the manga: It's still considered the best marketing operation in manga history!

Kimagure Orange Road is a popular teenage romance manga (even in the States), Crying Freeman is a great gekiga by Lone Wolf and Cub's Kazuo Koike and Mai the Girl with Powers's Yoichi Ikegami and Captain Tsubasa is a soccer manga which after almost 30 years of publication shows its main character Tsubasa Ohora being the captain of my fav team: F.C. Barcelona (he signed on 2002, and in my country everybody has still the mouth open in disbelief, mostly because the fans of the rival team, Real Madrid (yes, that team with David Beckham), loved Tsubasa because he played in a juvenile team dressed in white, like theirs. Take this, wahahahaha!!!).

And now let's go on-topic. Sorry.