This is the second in a seven-part series on the development of American fandom —to the point where today we use the term otaku, we know what it means, we know it’s not complimentary, and we still describe ourselves as otaku anyway.
(You know, in one of these columns I suppose we’ll get to that word,otaku, where it comes from, what it means, and the rise of that bastard pseudolanguage Fan Japanese... but not today. Dateline Japan, 1963…)
The Ages of Fan II: 1963-- Tezuka Again, and Landing on Foreign Shores
So, by the 60’s the Manga industry was humming along nicely. Of course, someone who isn’t a wikipedia editor would argue that it always was doing just fine, thanks, but with the contributions of that guy Tezuka (ref. last week's column and comments ) manga had shifted from a trifle aimed just at the kids market to a new art medium and commercial product with a growing number of fans of all ages.
At some point when I’m coming back to the manga industry in Japan[note: not in this series of columns, but maybe I’ll pick it up for some future guest blog] we’ll take a look at the gekiga genre, and seinen and josei comics and the transformation of shoujo (girls) comics when they started being drawn by, you know, women back in the 70s. (oh those wacky Japanese, what will they think of next?) But actually, I’m a little tired of bandying about Japanese terms that I myself am still a bit vague on, so I’m changing gears.
Let’s talk about cartoons.
In the beginning, the first imports of Japanese visual culture to the States weren’t manga, but cartoons. Oh, I’m sure there is an apocryphal story out there of an American GI stationed in Okinawa or elsewhere in Japan who got hooked on their comic books even though he couldn’t (initially) read the language; if there is, no one has posted his story to the ‘net, yet. (Or her story; it could just as easily have been an Army or Navy nurse from the 50s.) But the first seeds of American fandom were planted in the 60s and because of TV, not print.
Tetsuwan Atom was a manga title started in 1951 by our friend Osamu Tezuka (what, him again?) and it had pretty long legs; Wikipedia lists it at 23 volumes and with an overall run from 1952 to 1968, and with that kind of longevity I’m guessing it was pretty popular. In 1962 when Tezuka decided to start an animation company to produce shows for the new and growing television market, falling back on an established property like Tetsuwan Atom was likely a no-brainer. It featured a kid robot fighting evil, and I’m sure a lot of the manga read like an old movie serial or episodic TV show already.
Tetsuwan Atom, “Mighty Atom,” premeired on Japanese TV in January of 1963 and had a good run: 193 episodes over 4 years.
Not that Tezuma and his company, Mushi Production, were operating in a vacuum and suddenly invented TV cartoons on their own. Mushi Production was formed to compete with Toei Animation , which had already made a half dozen animated films, and had their own show (Ookami Shonen Ken, “Ken, the Wolf Boy”) which also premiered in 1963. Disney, both the man and the company, had been on the air for 9 years at that point, and his show (Originally “Disneyland” and later known as “Walt Disney Presents”) used recycled theatrical shorts as a staple for decades. Hanna-Barbera had been chugging along for five years already, with 8 shows to its credit including the flagships Flintstones and Yogi Bear.
Tetsuwan Atom gets a little special recognition in that it was Japanese, one of the very first shows of it’s kind (what we now call anime) and also the first export. Amazingly, the first English-dubbed episodes aired on American TV just 9 months after the Japanese debut. The show was now known as “Astro Boy”, since DC comics already had a character called “Mighty Atom”, and 104 of the 193 original episodes were bought up by NBC for translation into English. It had a great run for a few years, though as a black-and-white series it suffered as more and more households switched over to colour.
Since it was offered in syndication, I guess it is a hit-or-miss proposition as to whether or not you (or your dad… or grandpa) saw Astro Boy on local TV. But a few folks did. And quite a few have been fans ever since.
As a kids' cartoon, let’s say the oldest kid who would have fallen in love with the show during it’s first airing was 7 or 8. This first-grader of 1963 would have then been 10 when he saw Kimba, the White Lion and Gigantor(‘65), and aged 12 for the first run of Speed Racer (‘67). He might have been a senior in college, or maybe a grad student studying Japanese, during the first runs of Battle of the Planets and Star Blazers. During the 80s he watched Robotech, because even with it’s flaws it was still a good story (through the Macross plotline) and he probably traded fansubs ofHarlock and other shows on video tape with a small but rabid circle of other fans. If he could then just tough out a few lean years, a lot of badly dubbed dialog on video tapes, and the emergence of Pokemon as a phenomenon, his persistence and faith would be duly rewarded.
Being a fan today, with cable networks and DVDs and the growing demand/supply chain reaction, is easy. Back then, it was work.
There are many many younger kids, because almost all of these shows had long life in syndication, but our oldest Otaku was born in 1955, and today he is 54 years old. We salute you Tetsuwan Otaku! You were the first of us.
Further reading and references:
- An article from Fred Ladd, the American Director of “Astro Boy”
- Wiki: Astro Boy
- Wiki: Anime in the United States of America
- IMdB: Astroboy
- Also, Fred Patten’s excellent book, Watching Anime, Reading Manga
- Astro Boy (all 104 English Episodes) is available on DVD from The Right Stuf in two , count ‘em, two box sets.
Matt Thorn (see also, here ) was kind enough to comment on this column [two years ago, at Comicsnob.com] and since his comments added so much to the original post, I politely requested if I could copy said comments here.
Matt is a good guy, he said yes.
Comment from Matt Thorn
April 3, 2007, 11:01 am
Howdy. No corrections this time. Just something of a footnote. I don’t know how many American otaku have actually ever seen those old black-and-white Atom/Astro-Boy episodes, but the production values are jaw-droppingly awful, even by the standards of Hanna & Barbera at that time. The thing is, TV producers had decided that home-grown TV animation was simply impossible, because of budgetary restrictions. (Remember, this was before the Japanese economic miracle.) Tezuka, who was desperate to do TV animation told whatever network it was (I forget) that he could produce weekly half-hour episodes for some ridiculously low price (which I also forget), and when the network accepted, he had to keep his promise. For years, Tezuka and his company cut every corner imaginable and still managed to drive themselves into bankruptcy (in 1973). Tezuka used to say that manga was his wife and anime was his lover, and many people felt and feel that he should have remained faithful to his wife. He should have died a rich man, but he spent almost every yen he made through his manga (which was plenty) on making animation that rarely proved to be popular. It was an obsession with him. Week after week he would pump out these wretched episodes, packed with recycled footage, and once in a while, just to prove he could do it, he would produce these fantastic and artistic short films that never made a single yen but won awards around the world (such as “Jumping,” “Broken Film,” etc.). But he set the bar for early TV anime so low that it took years to raise production values to a reasonable level. When Tezuka died, dozens of famous manga and anime creators were asked to write eulogies. Miyazaki Hayao had the gall to write an honest one, in which he bitterly accused Tezuka of crippling the budding anime industry, and keeping it crippled for almost his entire life. Miyazaki had a point. On the other hand, I would argue that what gives anime its distinctive style, and makes it so attractive almost universally, is precisely the repertoire of tricks Japanese animators developed over decades to compensate for low budgets. While Disney poured money into the production of glorious, fluid detail, and Hanna-Barbera stuck with low-budget style that American audiences found tolerable, Japanese animators innovated continuously, coming up with remarkably effective techniques that are still in use today. I don’t think they could have done it if they had had money to burn, and today, even when they do have money to burn, they stand by these thrifty and time-proven techniques (Ohtomo Katsuhiro notwithstanding).
Um… really long footnote. Sorry.
Comment from Matt Blind
April 3, 2007, 5:02 pm
Thanks for the comment, Matt. Like at least one other commenter, you’ve said more in less space and with considerably less ’snark’ than I can usually manage.
Every now and then (because my “roommate” on comicsnob.com is not an otaku) I fall back into cheerleader mode and I’ll be caught out saying that if it’s Japanese, it must be good! Go Manga! Astro Boy is a fine example. From the column above you might think it was an early masterpiece of the art.
It’s not. Personally, I think it’s crap.
...but for the sake of my extended multi-column argument I had to start somewhere, and Astro Boy is first. Historical landmark, earliest possible exposure, all of that.
Next week we’ll pick it up with anime series that were actually *good*, and touch on the first boom that fizzled. There’s a lot of meat there; I have to re-read Patten and I have a feeling that one may run a little long, and may post late.
About the Author
Matt Blind is a bookseller: that’s his day job, working as an asst. manager at a far-flung outpost of one of the big box chains. He is also a big fan of manga, has been a blogger of one stripe or another since aught-four, drinks too much, and remembers enough discrete math from his classes at Georgia Tech to construct the truly frightening spreadsheet that spits out manga rankings.
Matt maintains his own site at RocketBomber.com where he occasionally posts manga reviews, book retail & publishing news, and commentary on fandom in general—but mostly wastes his time (and yours) with posts on the ever-changing variations and derivatives of the bestseller charts.
When dressed in his ‘civilian’ login, Matt is known as Anime Vice user rocketbomber—so when ‘rocketbomber’ comments below on how excellent this post is, take it with a grain of salt.
