CAA: Christian Anime Alliance

There are times in life when you realize that everything you believed in was a lie and the whole world collapses around you as you fall to your knees, throwing your arms up in a mute cry to the heavens. I just underwent one of those moments while filling My Anime List: I was convinced that in my tender days of early childhood I had watched Astro Boy... but in fact I watched this: http://myanimelist.net/anime/6087/Jetter_Mars

Just a glimpse of the main character's head shape fully excuses my mistake, I want to believe. But, perhaps more mindblowing, is the fact that it's another story by Tezuka, but directed by Rintaro. In hindsight, the fragments of storytelling I remember, are very Rintaroish.

The one that has always persisted in my memory is an episode about a human detective who despises robots and who gets paired with [s]Atom[/s] Mars to catch a rampaging robot. For the whole episode the detective berates and insults Mars, remarking that he's not human and is not able to show the emotions and virtues of human beings. In the end, a building collapses on top of them and Mars, sustaining grave damage, manages to pull the severely wounded body of the detective away. He undergoes extensive surgery and apologizes to Mars, telling him that he has changed his mind because so much of his body had to be replaced with mechanical parts that he has to consider himself a robot now.

Has anyone else seen this series?

Never seen it, but it certainly looks and sounds like Astro Boy. The themes are likely quite similar, so your childhood was probably imbued with an Atom-esque spirit nonetheless.

Interesting side note about the character designs: Are you familiar with the concept of Tezuka's "Galaxy of stars?" He basically had a stock of character designs that he reused in each of his works. Naturally, some criticized this move as lazy, but Tezuka's response was quite clever. He refereed to his stable of designs as his acting troupe, his group of stars. Of course he would cast them in role after role!

Hence, Mars and Atom look remarkably similar. They are, after all, "played" by the same star.

Yeah, interestingly, I learned of that very recently and I guess it goes to explain the similarity between the two robot kids. I have to wonder why Tezuka-sama felt the need to do two separate series with such similar premises.

EDIT: According to Wikipedia, the cause is, unsurprisingly, issues that Tezuka was having with the copyright of Tetsuwan Atom at the time. Also, interestingly, the origin story of Mars resemble greater that of Megaman. I wonder if the latter got its inspiration from the former.

lol interesting. Defiantly easily mistakable. So I guess America isn't the only country that makes several shows of the exact same thing with just a couple differences.