hi ani!! was wondering if you had a good recommendation for someone trying to get into astro boy? i see your posts about it and i want to give it a try! thank you for your time and i hope you have a lovely day~

waah thank you! And well there are plenty of ways to get into it

When it comes to actual astro boy anime series, there's 3 main ones: the 60s anime, the 80s anime and the 2003 one

The 2003 anime is the most recent, popular and accessible one, I recommend getting it from this blog https://astroboy2003sub.tumblr.com/ because essentially every version you'll find in anime websites has broken almost unintelligible subs half way through, the animation in it is honestly gorgeous and holds up better than a lot of modern shows right now

The 80s anime is also good and my personal favourite one because of how cheesy it is, however the 2nd episode of it is notoriously missing in most anime sites, there will be places that have it and others that don't (it is also the last version of astro boy Tezuka was involved with since he passed in the 80s sadly)

The 60s anime (the japanese version at least) is really hard to come by, I torrented it aeons ago from a site that went down and dont think ive found the episodes anywhere else...the anime itself is kind of a total mess but it's still funny to watch lol

A thing I do want to advice though is that please watch the subbed versions and not the dubs, I'm not saying this cause im some sort of sub over dub elitist but because dubbed versions of astro boy are always very heavily censored, have a lot of scenes cut out and the stories are straight up rewritten to the point you actually miss huge chunks of the show, the 2003 anime is infamous for removing/rewriting a lot of the heavier and most emotional scenes

There are also 2 major spin offs manga that are pretty good starting points:

Pluto by Naoki Urasawa, it's a re-interpretation of a chapter called 'The Greatest Robot on Earth' from the original manga, this manga centers around a robot policeman investigating a set of murders and honestly, its actually my favourite manga ever and the reason I got into astro boy to begin with, it is actually pretty mature and serious compared to any other astro boy related work also Atom still appears in it but is not the main character, an anime adaptation was announced a few years ago but we still don't have any info about it so..here's to that

also Atom looks very cute in it

and lastly there's Atom the Beginning, which is what most people have probably seen me talking about since right now its the only astro boy related series that has been active for the past years and it's still an on-going manga, basically its a story that takes place 30 years before the beginning of astro boy that focuses on Dr.Tenma (Atom's creator) and Dr. Ochanomizu (who ends becoming Atom's guardian) as university students researching AI, tbh I don't know how beginner friendly this series is because it has some pretty direct connections to the original AB manga and one of the best things about it is to catch all those references, but I have some friends that got into astro boy from it so I'll put it here too

also Tenma and Ochanomizu have this thing where they just squeeze each other's noses at random times and its cute and not weird at all!

i should mention the english translation is super behind from the japanese release and there's actually an anime adaptation too but it's like 90% filler and barely follows the story of the manga lol, still a good watch if you wanna see some animated nose honking

I should mention there's also always the original astro boy manga too but I don't actually know if its that beginner friendly since it's kinda messy to get into, since Tezuka rewrote and scrapped chapters so many times, nobody knows the actual chronology of the chapters and has a lot of consistency issues, still some chapters are REALLY good and some chapters are kinda insane lol

Keep in mind every iteration of astro boy changes the story a bit (or sometimes a lot) but its just fun to watch the stories be retold or interepreted in different ways