Don't forget to read Parts I and II of Akadot's interview with Fred Ladd.

If Osamu Tezuka is the God of Comics, fathering the popularity of comics in Japan and creating the first animated television series in Japan based on his creation, Testuwan Atom, then Fred Ladd is its favorite uncle, rearing the child in a foreign environment, America.

Akadot continues its interview as Ladd realizes how anime has grown in America and its children, not simply as an entertainment medium, but as a child.

Many of the folks that worked on Astro Boy, including you, have become enshrined by millions of fans. Did you ever think that something like that could happen when you first started working on the Astro Boy project?

FL: No. The last year and a half has come as a great surprise to me and I'm looking through new eyes now.

I'll do a [charity] show on the origins of stuff if the money is going to a good cause. Out here at UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles, they have a world famous film and television archive. A couple of years ago they kicked off a weeklong event showing Japanese animation. I was the kick-off event. It was an evening of Astro Boy, Kimba, and Gigantor.

This was the first show I had done of this kind. I had spoken to a few fans here and there, but this was under the auspices of the world famous repository and restorer . . . when you hear that the American Film Institute supports restoration, what they do is they take funds from grants that they get and give them to UCLA which does the actual restoring of pictures.

I'm also a member of the Television Academy out here. So the Academy, the Film Institute, and the archives and restorers at UCLA came to me and said, "You're a member of the Academy and we'd like you to help us put this on." When they put it that way you can't say no. You don't say no to the Academy. As a member of the Academy you're expected to "do" for the Academy.

I kicked off this event for them and it was the first time I had done this kind of thing. I didn't know much about it at the time. I said, okay, I'll kick off this event and maybe a couple handfuls of people will show up because I thought that anime was still a "sub-culture." I thought there would just be a few kooks that would show. The Japanese have a word, otaku. I thought you'd get a few otaku in here maybe a couple of others.

I was a little bit surprised by the turnout. Then within months I realized there's a circuit of these people. I got a call from the Mill Valley International Film Festival just outside of San Francisco so I agreed to kick off their event because they do restoration work too.

I went up there with my wife and here's this big lovely old theater they had restored and there I am up on the marquee with my name spelled right and then the shows are listed after that, Astro Boy, Gigantor, and Kimba. The thing kicked off on a Friday night so I was looking for the kids and I said, how many kids do you expect to have? It's starting seven-o' clock, it's too late for the kids. They said, "Well, just come in and you'll see."