What did you think of Tetsuwan Atom at first sight?

FL: At first I thought it was a cute little character. I liked the styling. I like the lampooning of various types of human beings. I liked the guy with the big schnooz. He had a big nose like an elephant so I called him Dr. Elefun. I thought at the time that there could be nobody with that name, but years later I picked up the phone book and discovered I was wrong. I was looking for another name and here were eight or nine Elefuns in a row! Had I known that I would have picked another name!

What it was like to work on the Astro Boy project.

FL: Well, right off in the first episode there were some cultural differences.

The first episode, "The Birth of Astro Boy," starts off with this scientist who has a kid. This kid gets mad at his father and takes off in a car. The kid's out driving, driving like a drunken sailor, like a maniac. He loses control of the car, smashes up, and he dies. The grief stricken father says, "Wait a minute, I'll build a robot who will be the image of my son and I'll love him like my own son."

That was the first case of a cultural difference. When the kid cracked up the American mentality of the time said, the kid was driving like a nut, almost kills a bunch of people, and when he dies they think, "Good. He deserves it and he brought it on himself. Better him than someone else."

So I said to the NBC folks, if we change it a little bit where the kid is a good little boy and it's the highway of the future in the year 2000 (in 1963 who ever thought there would be a year 2000?) and he gets to a spot where the highway glitches. He loses control of the car, and because of that damned highway, the car crashes.

Now he's not a kid going crazy on his own but he's the poor innocent victim of a highway gone wrong. Now Americans can feel pity for the kid, they understand the father's grief, and they can cheer when he makes the little robot in the image of his son.

Big cultural difference number two: the scientist/father build the robot in the image of his son and he loves him. But after a couple of years he notices the kid isn't growing. He says, "Hell, you're like a refrigerator, a TV set, or any other appliance. You're just a robot." So he decides to sell the robot to a cruel circus master. Could you see Geppetto selling Pinocchio to a circus? So I had to find a rationale for the father losing the robot. We couldn't change the animation, though we did sometimes shorten scenes a bit.

We never re-edited a picture and re-jumbled the scenes though. But what we had to do sometimes was to shorten a scene a few seconds because of "over-the-top" violence. If a crook had a gun and points it at a victim and say "Give me your money or I'll blast you," and the crook put the gun against the person's temple, that's where we'd cut. Just before he put the gun to the person's head. If I didn't cut it the NBC guys would say, "For cryin' out loud!"

So by doing that we could lessen the violence in some of the episodes and save them from being rejected by NBC.