When / How did you become an Astro fan?
Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2013 10:07 pm
I was almost 11 years old when Astro Boy first aired in NYC (I think on channel 5). Being a nerdy weakling who wasn't good at sports, I got picked on a bit in school, and I fantasized having Astro as friend. Back then being a fan of any TV show was a lonely thing, there wasn't any Internet, no fan conventions. It was all marketing and merchandise. Sometimes merchants would form a 'fan club', but these were just gimmicks to promote advertising for fan merchandise. Today things are so different, its easy for fandom to thrive and people to meet others with the same interests.
So when the show went off the air I moved on to other interests (Star Trek, Space 1999, Dr. Who, etc) and pushed Astro into the back of my mind. I did find out as a kid that Astro was an import from Japan. I had an Uncle who worked for Panasonic, and he made one or two business trips to Japan a year. He sometimes brought stuff back, and I vaguely remember seeing a manga book at his house with Astro's picture on the cover with the English title "Mighty Atom", and most everything else in Japanese.
I never ran into the 1980 Astro TV series. I don't know if it was on network TV or only carried on Cable. By then I had graduated college and I was working in South Florida for a computer related firm. I had cable TV, but never saw listings for the show. Maybe it was on early morning Saturdays in the Kids show slots, which I didn't even scan anymore. (There was one Kid's show on Nick that DID catch my eye called "The mysterious cities of gold" which had a very strong SciFi theme to it. I'd like to find a DVD collection for this one).
Then one day I saw the coming attractions in the theater for the 2009 Astro Boy movie. I hadn't thought about the 1963 anime in years, but the instant I saw the first few seconds of that promo it all came back in a flash! A search of the Internet later brought back tons of information that I had never known. I found videos on YouTube (Someone with the user name "mushroom of doom" or something like that, had posted the entire 104 episodes on Youtube, that must have taken him or her forever!) I also learned about Osmau Tezuka (I never knew who had created Astro back then, although Tezuka was listed in the credits). I quickly became a fan of the "Manga God", and I've searched the interlibrary loan link on the net to borrow as many of his works that were available in English, both in print and DVD. Hulu had both the 1980 and 2003 versions of the anime up on their free site for a while.
So that's my fan story. What's yours?
So when the show went off the air I moved on to other interests (Star Trek, Space 1999, Dr. Who, etc) and pushed Astro into the back of my mind. I did find out as a kid that Astro was an import from Japan. I had an Uncle who worked for Panasonic, and he made one or two business trips to Japan a year. He sometimes brought stuff back, and I vaguely remember seeing a manga book at his house with Astro's picture on the cover with the English title "Mighty Atom", and most everything else in Japanese.
I never ran into the 1980 Astro TV series. I don't know if it was on network TV or only carried on Cable. By then I had graduated college and I was working in South Florida for a computer related firm. I had cable TV, but never saw listings for the show. Maybe it was on early morning Saturdays in the Kids show slots, which I didn't even scan anymore. (There was one Kid's show on Nick that DID catch my eye called "The mysterious cities of gold" which had a very strong SciFi theme to it. I'd like to find a DVD collection for this one).
Then one day I saw the coming attractions in the theater for the 2009 Astro Boy movie. I hadn't thought about the 1963 anime in years, but the instant I saw the first few seconds of that promo it all came back in a flash! A search of the Internet later brought back tons of information that I had never known. I found videos on YouTube (Someone with the user name "mushroom of doom" or something like that, had posted the entire 104 episodes on Youtube, that must have taken him or her forever!) I also learned about Osmau Tezuka (I never knew who had created Astro back then, although Tezuka was listed in the credits). I quickly became a fan of the "Manga God", and I've searched the interlibrary loan link on the net to borrow as many of his works that were available in English, both in print and DVD. Hulu had both the 1980 and 2003 versions of the anime up on their free site for a while.
So that's my fan story. What's yours?