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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.
This series has 193 episodes.
There were two remakes of the series made in 1980 and 2003.
It was aired in 1951 in Japan, but is now refered to as AstroBoy (1963), because that is the year it came to America.
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