Astro Boy

Who will stand against invaders from space, robot slave masters, and a dictator producing human clones? Astro Boy, that’s who! The most popular and influential creation of Osamu Tezuka, “the Walt Disney of Japan,” Astro Boy is all-ages adventure packed with action, laughs, and a few tugs at the heartstrings.

Free-to-play game based on Osamu Tezuka's works launched in April Active Gaming Media and Tezuka Productions announced on September 14 that their Astro Boy: Edge of Time digital card game received a new expansion that adds Vampires and Witches based on Tezuka's The Vampires manga to the game. The companies also added new skills to the game, as well as 100 new cards and a new faction. Active Gaming Media launched a Kickstarter campaign for the game in August 2016, but canceled it three days before the campaign ended, with only US$7,255 of its US$50,000 goal. However, the game's parallel crowdfunding campaign on the Japanese Makuake site was successful. DMM released the game as a free-to-play digital card game with in-app purchases for PC on April 12. The game also had planned iOS and Android versions, but these are not currently listed on the game's website. The game received a PC release via Steam on June 19. The game is based on the works of manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka.

Astro Boy battles Frankenstein robot in treatment for 1st ever half-hour anime show Eiji Ōtsuka, a 59-year-old professor at the International Center for Japanese Studies, reported that he discovered an unused 36-page scenario for an unaired first episode of Osamu Tezuka's landmark television anime Astro Boy (Mighty Atom). Film historian Mamoru Makino had written the scenario through an invitation and contract with Tezuka, and Makino had been storing the scenario at his home in Tokyo. Makino had been working as a documentary filmmaker at the time. The scenario, titled "Frankenstein," is handwritten on 36 pages of manuscript paper (seen right), with editing and revision notes by Tezuka himself. The episode sees the titular robot hero Astro Boy facing off against Frankenstein, a robot controlled by evildoers. The story treatment opens with the staff in a robot factory conversing, and Tezuka hand-wrote a comment in the treatment: "Wouldn't this opening scene be better without