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.
