Cyberpunk: 1990 Documentary Featuring William Gibson & Timothy Leary Introduces the Cyberpunk Culture

in Film, Sci Fi, Technology, Web/Tech | August 15th, 2014

“High tech and low life”: nev­er have I heard a lit­er­ary genre so ele­gant­ly encap­su­lat­ed. I repeat it when­ev­er a friend who finds out I enjoy read­ing cyber­punk nov­els — or watch­ing cyber­punk movies, or play­ing cyber­punk video games — asks what “cyber­punk” actu­al­ly means. We’ve all heard the word thrown around since the mid-1980s, and I seem to recall hear­ing it sev­er­al times a day in the 1990s, when the devel­op­ment of the inter­net and its asso­ci­at­ed pieces of per­son­al tech­nol­o­gy hit the accel­er­a­tor hard. At the dawn of that decade, out came Cyber­punk, a primer on the epony­mous move­ment in not just lit­er­a­ture, film, and com­put­ers, but music, fash­ion, crime, pun­ish­ment, and med­i­cine as well. That time saw tech­nol­o­gy devel­op in such a way as to empow­er less gov­ern­ments, cor­po­ra­tions, and oth­er insti­tu­tions than indi­vid­ual peo­ple: vir­tu­ous peo­ple, sketchy peo­ple, every­day peo­ple, and that favorite cyber­punk char­ac­ter type, the “gen­tle­man-los­er.”

We recent­ly fea­tured No Maps for These Ter­ri­to­ries, the 2000 doc­u­men­tary star­ring William Gib­son, author of nov­els like Neu­ro­mancer, Idoru, and Pat­tern Recog­ni­tion and the writer most close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the cyber­punk move­ment. Cyber­punk describes him, a decade ear­li­er, as  “the man who may be said to have start­ed it all,” and here he shares insights on how the lit­er­ary form he pio­neered made pos­si­ble styl­is­tic devel­op­ment with­in and the impor­ta­tion of ele­ments of the wider lit­er­ary and artis­tic world into the reac­tionary “gold­en ghet­to” of the sci­ence-fic­tion indus­try. We also hear, amid a far­ra­go of glossy, flam­boy­ant­ly arti­fi­cial ear­ly-1990s com­put­er ani­ma­tion, from a num­ber of cyber­punk-inclined artists, musi­cians, sci­en­tists, and hack­ers.

This line­up includes psy­chol­o­gist, LSD enthu­si­ast, and Neu­ro­mancer PC game mas­ter­mind Tim­o­thy Leary, in some sense a prog­en­i­tor of this whole cul­ture of self-enhance­ment through tech­nol­o­gy. How has all this worked out in the near-quar­ter-cen­tu­ry since? It depends on whether one of Gib­son’s dark­er pre­dic­tions aired here will come true: if things go wrong, he says, the future could in real­i­ty end up not as a grand per­son­al empow­er­ment but as “a very expen­sive Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion com­mer­cial inject­ed direct­ly into your cor­tex.” For­tu­nate­ly for cyber­punks the world over, we haven’t got there yet. Quite.

(And if this doc­u­men­tary gets you want­i­ng to jump into cyber­punk lit­er­a­ture, you could do worse than start­ing with Rudy Ruck­er’s Ware Tetral­o­gy, two of whose books won the Philip K. Dick Award for best nov­el, all of which come with an intro­duc­tion by Gib­son, now avail­able free online.)

Cyber­punk will be added to our col­lec­tion, 285 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Road Trip with Cyber­space Vision­ary William Gib­son, Watch No Maps for These Ter­ri­to­ries (2000)

Tim­o­thy Leary Plans a Neu­ro­mancer Video Game, with Art by Kei­th Har­ing, Music by Devo & Cameos by David Byrne

William Gib­son, Father of Cyber­punk, Reads New Nov­el in Sec­ond Life

What’s the Inter­net? That’s So 1994…

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Charles Bukowski Uncensored

in Poetry | August 15th, 2014

Charles Bukows­ki, the Poet Lau­re­ate of Amer­i­can Lowlife, would have cel­e­brat­ed his 94th birth­day tomor­row, almost cer­tain­ly with some beer and cig­a­rettes. (The very stuff that makes it dif­fi­cult to reach 94 — but I digress.) To mark this occa­sion, the folks behind the Blank on Blank ani­ma­tions pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured on Open Cul­ture have cre­at­ed a video called “Charles Bukows­ki Uncen­sored.” The video ani­mates out­takes from can­did con­ver­sa­tions that took place between Bukows­ki, his wife, and the pro­duc­er of the record­ing ses­sion for the 1993 audio CD, Run With the Hunt­ed. It’s a lit­tle some­thing to hold you over until the Blank on Blank team returns with new ani­ma­tions this fall. If you’re won­der­ing, Bukows­ki died in 1994, at age 73.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Charles Bukows­ki: Depres­sion and Three Days in Bed Can Restore Your Cre­ative Juices (NSFW)

Read 113 Pages of Charles Bukowski’s FBI File From 1968

Three Charles Bukows­ki Poems Ani­mat­ed

The Last (Faxed) Poem of Charles Bukows­ki

“Don’t Try”: Charles Bukowski’s Con­cise Phi­los­o­phy of Art and Life

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Ernest Hemingway: T.S. Eliot “Can Kiss My Ass As a Man”

in Literature | August 15th, 2014

HemingwayEliot

T.S. Eliot may have been the most unavoid­able force in Amer­i­can let­ters in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, but he was prob­a­bly not a very lik­able per­son. At least Ernest Hem­ing­way didn’t think so. The burly nov­el­ist, often in the habit of telling fel­low writ­ers to “kiss my ass,” wrote in a July 1950 let­ter to writer and edi­tor Har­vey Bre­it that Eliot could do just that “as a man,” since he “nev­er hit a ball out of the infield in his life and he would not have exist­ed for dear old Ezra [Pound], the love­ly poet and stu­pid trai­tor.” Of Pound’s “stu­pid” trea­son, Hem­ing­way had pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten some choice words; Of Eliot’s sins—in addi­tion to his fail­ing to mea­sure up to Yogi Berra, despite both of them hail­ing from St. Louis—Hemingway includ­ed the fol­low­ing: “Roy­al­ist, Anglo-Catholic and con­ser­v­a­tive”

Despite all this, how­ev­er, Hem­ing­way, like most of his mod­ernist con­tem­po­raries, owed a debt to Eliot, whom Papa almost-grudg­ing­ly admit­ted was “a damned good poet and a fair crit­ic,” though “there isn’t any law a man has to go and see [Eliot’s play] the Cock­tail par­ty” [sic]. Writes Wen­dolyn E. Tet­low, author of Hemingway’s In Our Time: Lyri­cal Dimen­sions, “despite Hemingway’s acid com­ments, how­ev­er, he could not escape Eliot’s influ­ence.” Of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance for Hemingway’s terse, ellip­ti­cal style was the Eliot doc­trine of the “objec­tive cor­rel­a­tive,” some­thing of a refine­ment of Pound’s imag­ism. In Hemingway’s rumi­na­tions on his own process, it seems he could not have done with­out this poet­ic technique—one of encap­su­lat­ing abstract con­cepts and fleet­ing, insub­stan­tial emo­tions in the amber of con­crete, dis­crete objects, sym­bols, and acts.

“Find what gave you the emo­tion,” Hem­ing­way wrote in “The End of Some­thing,” remark­ing on a schooner mov­ing through a ruined mill town, “then write it down mak­ing it clear so the read­er will see it and have the same feel­ing.” Eliot would nev­er have been so vul­gar as to plain­ly spell out his method in the text itself, like a set of instruc­tions, but Hem­ing­way does so again in Death in the After­noon:

I was try­ing to write then and I found the great­est dif­fi­cul­ty, aside from know­ing tru­ly what you real­ly felt, rather than what you were sup­posed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what real­ly hap­pened in action; what the actu­al things were which pro­duced the emo­tion that you expe­ri­enced.

Com­pare these pas­sages with Eliot’s def­i­n­i­tion in his 1919 essay on Ham­let: “The only way of express­ing emo­tion in the form of art is by find­ing an ‘objec­tive cor­rel­a­tive’; in oth­er words, a set of objects, a sit­u­a­tion, a chain of events which shall be the for­mu­la of that par­tic­u­lar emo­tion.” The influence—if not out­right borrowing—is unmis­tak­able. Yet Hem­ing­way remained leery of Eliot “as a man.” In 1954, Robert Man­ning of The Atlantic vis­it­ed Hem­ing­way in Cuba and found him surly on the sub­ject and “not warm toward T.S. Eliot,” pre­fer­ring instead to “praise Ezra Pound.” Hem­ing­way would go so far, in fact, as to claim that Pound deserved Eliot’s Nobel.

We shouldn’t take any of this salty talk too seri­ous­ly. After all, Hem­ing­way, the great boast­er, liked to trash peo­ple he envied. Even Joe Louis, whom you would think aspir­ing box­er Hem­ing­way would hold in high­est esteem, “nev­er learned to box,” though he was, Papa admit­ted, “a good get­ter-upper.”

via Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ernest Hem­ing­way to F. Scott Fitzger­ald: “Kiss My Ass”

Ernest Hem­ing­way Writes of His Fas­cist Friend Ezra Pound: “He Deserves Pun­ish­ment and Dis­grace” (1943)

Ernest Hemingway’s Delu­sion­al Adven­tures in Box­ing: “My Writ­ing is Noth­ing, My Box­ing is Every­thing.”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch Quentin Tarantino Fave The Street Fighter, The First Movie To Get an X‑Rating for Violence (NSFW)

in Film | August 15th, 2014

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Bruce Lee died in 1973 just before the pre­miere of Enter the Drag­on — the high­est gross­ing movie of that year. Lee’s sud­den and mys­te­ri­ous death left a huge void that stu­dios scram­bled to fill. Some shady Hong Kong pro­duc­ers start­ed crank­ing out kung fu flicks star­ring decep­tive­ly named actors like Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bruce Lai or, com­bin­ing two ‘70s tough guys in one name, Bron­son Lee. Amer­i­can stu­dios start­ed mak­ing movies like Black Belt Jones star­ring Enter the Drag­on co-star Jim Kel­ly. It was in this con­text that Amer­i­can pro­duc­ers acquired the Japan­ese karate thriller Gek­i­tot­su! Sat­su­jin Ken star­ring Shinichi Chi­ba and renamed it The Street Fight­er. The movie became noto­ri­ous for earn­ing an X‑rating sole­ly for vio­lence, and it turned its lead, rechris­tened Son­ny Chi­ba, into a cult idol. You can watch The Street Fight­er above, poor­ly dubbed and in the wrong aspect ratio. Just as it was prob­a­bly screened at your local grind­house the­ater back dur­ing the Ford admin­is­tra­tion. (The film, by the way, is in the pub­lic domain.)

The movie’s sto­ry is a typ­i­cal tale of man­ly hon­or, revenge and betray­al, where men set­tle their dif­fer­ences with their fists and women — the “good” women, any­way – sim­per on the side­lines. Chi­ba plays Ter­ry Tsu­ru­gi, a badass street thug. Sure, he might be a world-class jerk, espe­cial­ly after he sells one dead­beat client into pros­ti­tu­tion, but he’s a jerk with a code of hon­or. Of course, you don’t watch mar­tial arts movies – or almost any Japan­ese movie from the 1970s, real­ly – for its pro­gres­sive stance on gen­der rela­tions. You watch them for the ass kick­ing. And on that front, The Street Fight­er deliv­ers. So when Tsug­uri gets hired to pro­tect the beau­ti­ful daugh­ter of a dead oil tycoon from a nefar­i­ous band of gang­sters, you know he will do just that, even if it involves throw­ing punch­es, deliv­er­ing gory eye gouges and, in one mem­o­rable scene, rip­ping the tes­ti­cles clean off of a rapist. The movie’s relent­less vio­lence and gen­er­al nihilism made The Street Fight­er a hit, spawn­ing a hand­ful of sequels – Return of the Street Fight­er, Sis­ter Street Fight­er and Street Fighter’s Last Revenge. The movie also made at least one major fan: Quentin Taran­ti­no.

Taran­ti­no loved the movie in a way that only the reign­ing uber-nerd of ’70s exploita­tion movies could: he made ref­er­ences to it in his works. Clarence and Alaba­ma watched The Street Fight­er and its sequels in True Romance. Taran­ti­no even cast Chi­ba as Han­zo, the ace katana mak­er in Kill Bill. In the run up to his 2007 dou­ble bill with Robert Rodriguez, Grind­house, Taran­ti­no placed The Street Fight­er 13th on his list of favorite exploita­tion flicks, above Dario Argento’s gial­lo clas­sic Sus­piria but below the absolute­ly bonkers Mas­ter of the Fly­ing Guil­lo­tine.

You can find The Street Fight­er list­ed in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bruce Lee: The Lost TV Inter­view

Watch 10-Year-Old Bruce Lee in His First Star­ring Role (1950)

Bruce Lee Audi­tions for The Green Hor­net (1964)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly. 

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Robin Williams & Bobby McFerrin Sing Fun Cover of The Beatles’ “Come Together”

in Comedy, Music | August 14th, 2014

In 1998, leg­endary Bea­t­les’ pro­duc­er George Martin—all set to “hang up his ear­phones” and retire— brought togeth­er the most unusu­al assort­ment of peo­ple for In My Life, a trib­ute album com­posed entire­ly of Mar­tin-pro­duced Bea­t­les’ songs per­formed pri­mar­i­ly by actors and come­di­ans. Goldie Hawn gives a “gig­gly night­club chanteuse” read­ing of “A Hard Day’s Night,” Bil­ly Con­nol­ly does a slight­ly cracked ver­sion of “Being for the Ben­e­fit of Mr. Kite,” Jim Car­rey cov­ers “I Am the Wal­rus” (in a musi­cal per­for­mance sur­pris­ing­ly sub­dued next to, for exam­ple, his ren­di­tion of ”Some­body to Love”), and Sean Con­nery clos­es things out with a somber read­ing of “In My Life.”

But the album’s open­ing track is its best: Robin Williams and Bob­by McFerrin’s duet of “Come Togeth­er” redeems many of the record’s weak­est moments. Just above, hear the track over a fan-made slideshow of Williams high­lights. Williams and McFer­rin had teamed up before in the won­der­ful­ly sil­ly video for “Don’t Wor­ry Be Hap­py.” Here, with ample help from Martin’s lush pro­duc­tion, they man­age to evoke the slinky, seduc­tive weird­ness of the orig­i­nal song while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly hav­ing a goofy old time of it. Pop­mat­ters edi­tor Sarah Zup­ko, a self-con­fessed Beat­le­ma­ni­ac who oth­er­wise found the album a supreme dis­ap­point­ment, calls Williams’ “leer­ing” through the song “a hoot,” and I’m sure you’ll agree.

Just above, watch a one-hour BBC doc­u­men­tary on the mak­ing of In My Life. At 9:30, see Williams, Mar­tin, and McFer­rin in the hys­ter­i­cal record­ing ses­sions for their “Come Togeth­er” cov­er. Mar­tin admits that he asked Williams to join the project “with some trep­i­da­tion,” then real­ized that “it was with some trep­i­da­tion” that Williams accept­ed. It was Williams who sug­gest­ed “bring­ing along a mate,” McFer­rin, whom he calls “a one-man accom­pa­ni­ment.” Among many oth­er charms, the short doc fea­tures Mar­tin through­out explain­ing not only the process of record­ing In My Life, but also his mem­o­ries of the orig­i­nal record­ing ses­sions for these songs, clear­ly so dear to him and his proud­est lega­cy. But of course, giv­en our nation­al peri­od of mourn­ing for the warm, bril­liant­ly fun­ny, deeply humane, and trag­i­cal­ly sad Robin Williams, the real joy is see­ing him here in much hap­pi­er times, encour­ag­ing and prais­ing the tal­ents of oth­ers even as he shines so bright­ly along­side them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Robin Williams (1951–2014) Per­forms Unknown Shake­speare Play in 1970s Standup Rou­tine

Bob­by McFer­rin Shows the Pow­er of the Pen­ta­ton­ic Scale

George Mar­tin, Leg­endary Bea­t­les Pro­duc­er, Shows How to Mix the Per­fect Song Dry Mar­ti­ni

Jim Car­rey Sings a Pret­ty Damn Good Cov­er of The Bea­t­les “I Am the Wal­rus”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

 

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Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Abandoned Manuscript, The Watsons

in Writing | August 14th, 2014

Austen Pins

Before the word proces­sor, before White­out, before Post It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that’s what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare man­u­scripts. In 2011, the Bodleian Library acquired the man­u­script of Austen’s aban­doned nov­el, The Wat­sons. In announc­ing the acqui­si­tion, the Bodleian wrote:

The Wat­sons is Jane Austen’s first extant draft of a nov­el in process of devel­op­ment and one of the ear­li­est exam­ples of an Eng­lish nov­el to sur­vive in its for­ma­tive state. Only sev­en man­u­scripts of fic­tion by Austen are known to survive.The Wat­sons man­u­script is exten­sive­ly revised and cor­rect­ed through­out, with cross­ings out and inter­lin­ear addi­tions.

Janeausten.ac.uk (the web site where Austen’s man­u­scripts have been dig­i­tized) takes a deep­er dive into the curi­ous qual­i­ty of The Wat­sons man­u­script, not­ing:

The man­u­script is writ­ten and cor­rect­ed through­out in brown iron-gall ink. The pages are filled in a neat, even hand with signs of con­cur­rent writ­ing, era­sure, and revi­sion, inter­rupt­ed by occa­sion­al pas­sages of heavy inter­lin­ear cor­rec­tion.… The man­u­script is with­out chap­ter divi­sions, though not with­out infor­mal divi­sion by wider spac­ing and ruled lines. The full pages sug­gest that Jane Austen did not antic­i­pate a pro­tract­ed process of redraft­ing. With no cal­cu­lat­ed blank spaces and no obvi­ous way of incor­po­rat­ing large revi­sion or expan­sion she had to find oth­er strate­gies – the three patch­es, small pieces of paper, each of which was filled close­ly and neat­ly with the new mate­r­i­al, attached with straight pins to the pre­cise spot where erased mate­r­i­al was to be cov­ered or where an inser­tion was required to expand the text.

Accord­ing to Christo­pher Fletch­er, Keep­er of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions at the Bodleian Library, this prick­ly method of edit­ing was­n’t exact­ly new. Archivists at the library can trace pins being used as edit­ing tools back to 1617.

You can find The Wat­sons online here:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Recipes of Icon­ic Authors: Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Roald Dahl, the Mar­quis de Sade & More

15-Year-Old Jane Austen Writes a Satir­i­cal His­to­ry Of Eng­land: Read the Hand­writ­ten Man­u­script Online (1791)

Read Jane Austen’s Man­u­scripts Online

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Tap Into Timeless Wisdom: Download 36 Free Courses in Ancient History, Literature & Philosophy

in Education, History, Literature, Online Courses, Philosophy | August 14th, 2014

Parthenon_from_westsmall

I know, it’s a dat­ed ref­er­ence now, but since I still watch the remade Bat­tlestar Galac­ti­ca series on Net­flix, the mys­ti­cal refrain—“All of this has hap­pened before and will hap­pen again”–still seems fresh to me. At any rate, it’s fresh­er than the clichéd “his­to­ry repeats itself.” How­ev­er you phrase it, the tru­ism looks more and more like a gen­uine truth the more one stud­ies ancient his­to­ry, lit­er­a­ture, and phi­los­o­phy. The con­flicts and con­cerns that feel so of the moment also occu­pied the minds and lives of peo­ple liv­ing hun­dreds, and thou­sands, of years ago, and what­ev­er you make of that, it cer­tain­ly helps put the present into per­spec­tive. Can we ben­e­fit from study­ing the wis­dom, and the fol­ly, of the ancients? To this ques­tion, I like to turn to an intro­duc­to­ry essay C.S. Lewis penned to the work of a cer­tain church father:

Every age has its own out­look. It is spe­cial­ly good at see­ing cer­tain truths and spe­cial­ly liable to make cer­tain mis­takes. We all, there­fore, need the books that will cor­rect the char­ac­ter­is­tic mis­takes of our own peri­od. And that means the old books. […] If we read only mod­ern books […] where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggra­vate the error with which we are already dan­ger­ous­ly ill. The only pal­lia­tive is to keep the clean sea breeze of the cen­turies blow­ing through our minds, and this can be done only by read­ing old books.

I may dis­agree with Lewis about many things, includ­ing that “clean sea breeze” of his­to­ry, but I take to heart his point about read­ing the ancients to mit­i­gate our mod­ern bias­es and shine light on our blind spots. To that end, we present links to sev­er­al excel­lent online cours­es on the ancients from insti­tu­tions like Yale, NYU, and Stan­ford, free to peruse or take in full. See our mas­ter list—Free Cours­es in Ancient His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture & Phi­los­o­phy—for 36 qual­i­ty offer­ings. As always, cer­tain cours­es pro­vide more resources than oth­ers, and a few only offer their lec­tures through iTunes. These are deci­sions course admin­is­tra­tors have made, not us! Even so, these free resources are invalu­able to those wish­ing to acquaint, or reac­quaint, them­selves with the study of ancient human­i­ties.

You can, for exam­ple, take a course on Ancient Israel from NYU’s Daniel Flem­ing (Free Online Video & Course Info — Free Online Video), study Plato’s Laws with the renowned Leo Strauss from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go (Free Online Audio) or Socrates ( Free Online Audio) with that university’s equal­ly renowned Alan Bloom. Take a course called “Ancient Wis­dom and Mod­ern Love” (Syl­labus - Free iTunes Video — Free Online Video) with Notre Dame’s David O’Connor or study Virgil’s Aeneid ( Free iTunes Audio) with Susan­na Braund, whose lec­tures were record­ed at Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies. You’ll find many more ancient his­to­ry, lit, and phi­los­o­phy classes—36 in all, includ­ing five more Leo Strauss Pla­to seminars—on our meta list: Free Cours­es in Ancient His­to­ry, Lit­er­a­ture & Phi­los­o­phy. Read, study, repeat.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien

Learn 47 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

Ita­lo Calvi­no Offers 14 Rea­sons We Should Read the Clas­sics

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch the First Episode of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, Of Which Stanley Kubrick Became a Big Fan

in Animation, Film, Television | August 14th, 2014

Osamu Tezu­ka is one of the great cre­ative forces of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Known in his native Japan as the “god of man­ga,” Tezu­ka was mind-bog­gling­ly pro­duc­tive, crank­ing out around 170,000 pages of comics in his 60 years of life. He almost sin­gle-hand­ed­ly made man­ga respectable to read for adults, cre­at­ing tales that were both uni­ver­sal and emo­tion­al­ly com­plex. And he worked in pret­ty much every genre you can imag­ine from hor­ror, to girly fan­ta­sy, to an epic series about the life of the Bud­dha. Yet of all of Tezuka’s many vol­umes of comics, his best beloved work was Tet­suwan Ato­mu, oth­er­wise known as Astro Boy.

In 1962, Tezu­ka ful­filled a child­hood dream by open­ing an ani­ma­tion stu­dio. One of his first projects was to adapt was Astro Boy. The tele­vi­sion series pre­miered in 1963 and proved to be huge­ly pop­u­lar in Japan. It wasn’t long before Amer­i­can TV start­ed air­ing dubbed ver­sions of the show. You can see the very first episode, “Birth of Astro Boy,” above.

After his son dies in a freak car acci­dent, sci­en­tist Dr. Astor Boyn­ton is dri­ven mad by grief. He devel­ops an insane laugh and, with it, an equal­ly insane plan to build a robot who looks just like his dead son. After a Franken­stein-esque mon­tage, Astro Boy is born. All seems well for the adorable, sweet-natured robot, until Boyn­ton freaks out over Astro Boy’s lack of  growth. “I’ve been a good father to you, haven’t I?” he whines. “Well then, why can’t you be a good son to me and grow up to be a nor­mal human adult?” How’s that for a parental guilt trip?

astroboy-birth

So Dr. Boyn­ton casts Astro Boy out, sell­ing him into slav­ery to The Great Cac­cia­tore, an evil cir­cus ring­leader who forces him to be the world’s cutest robot glad­i­a­tor. For­tu­nate­ly, Dr. Ele­fun, a col­league of Dr. Boyn­ton, takes pity on Astro Boy and works to free him from his bondage.

The whole sto­ry plays out as if Mary Shel­ley and Fritz Lang col­lab­o­rat­ed to make Dum­bo. Tezu­ka throws in a lot of wacky slap­stick com­e­dy, which just bare­ly takes the edge off the story’s Dick­en­sian melo­dra­ma, which relent­less­ly mines all those pri­mal fears you thought you got over. In short, it’s bril­liant.

The series ran for two years in the States and then con­tin­ued on re-runs though­out the decade. One of the shows fans was appar­ent­ly Stan­ley Kubrick. Dur­ing the mid-60s, Kubrick sent Tezu­ka a let­ter ask­ing if he would be inter­est­ed in help­ing with the art direc­tion and design of his new movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. The offer would have required that Tezu­ka spend a year or more in Lon­don. Though great­ly flat­tered, Tezu­ka turned the offer down. The worka­holic artist sim­ply couldn’t spend that much time away from his stu­dio. One has to won­der what Kubrick’s mas­ter­piece would have looked like seen through the prism of Tezu­ka.

In 2001, Steven Spiel­berg pre­miered a movie that was a long ges­tat­ing project of Kubrick’s – the wild­ly under­rat­ed A.I. Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence. The par­al­lels between that movie, about a robot child cast out by his par­ents into a cru­el world, and Astro Boy are strik­ing. Kubrick, as it turns out, might have been even a big­ger fan of the God of Man­ga than pre­vi­ous­ly thought.

Here’s the trail­er for A.I. Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence.


Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Kafka’s Night­mare Tale, ‘A Coun­try Doc­tor,’ Told in Award-Win­ning Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion

Japan­ese Car­toons from the 1920s and 30s Reveal the Styl­is­tic Roots of Ani­me

How to Make Instant Ramen Com­pli­ments of Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion Direc­tor Hayao Miyza­ki

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly. 

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