This morning, April 7, 2003, Atom Boy was born.
At least, that’s according to the comic strip Tetsuwan Atomu, started in the 50’s by Osamu Tezuka.
The comic strip became a TV show in 1963 and was one of the first Japanese cartoons to become popular in America (as Astro Boy), where it was later followed by some of Tezuka’s other works, including Kimba, the White Lion. His work had a major influnce on Japanese animation that can still be seen in cartoons of today. The show also influenced a generation of robotics researchers, as engineers at Honda have said they when they first began working on creating a humanoid robot (such as their P3 and the later Asimo), they set today as their deadline to produce a working model.
He said in interviews that he chose 2003 as Atom Boy’s birthdate because he thought it was far enough in the future that the technology might really exist by then, but near enough that children watching the show could imagine seeing it happen in their lifetimes. Tezuka himself, unfortunately, did not live to see his creation’s ‘birth’, having died of stomach cancer in 1989 at the age of sixty.
In the Tokyo neighborhood of Takadanobaba, there was a parade of over 200 people dressed as characters from the TV show.
Japan Times Article (with a photo on the front page. The guy in back with the beret is dressed as Tezuka, btw.)
Mainichi News story