A few days ago, I made a post questioning why from episode 32 and beyond, the dubbed episodes were in the correct order. I supplied you buds with screenies from Wikipedia and also was open to feedback to see what you buds thought were the reasonings.

Well, last night, a casual conversation on the Astro Boy Discord server lead me to play detective and get to the bottom of this: so I have some updates!

First of all, let’s backtrack a bit to about maybe 5 or so years ago, the day I got the entire 03 series on DVD in a boxed set.

I vaguely (as of last night) remember looking at the back of the box to find it saying something along the lines of “containing 29 episodes never aired in the United States.”

And so to prove this was accurate and I wasn’t suffering from some sort of Mandela Effect, I took to Amazon, where my DVD set came from, to see if I could find out.

It took me a while, but I did find the listing, but it didn’t show the back of the box in any of it’s preview images, but thankfully the product description had a section with the text on the back written out:

Bingo.

But wait, that doesn’t make sense? ALL of the episodes DID air though?

Or did they…?

Because in 2005…. They didn’t.

This boxed set was released in 2005! So technically in 2005, you could say that 29 episodes contained in the set never aired in America, and you’d be correct!

Even though now that statement is false, since episodes 32 and on did in fact air, just 2 years after the boxes release (and 3 years after the original air dates)

So the definitive theory is that the second half is in order because, well… those episodes never aired! So they were put in order by Sony themselves!

With that out of the way, though, now I’m left to wonder, why was there even a first and second half to begin with?

And that’s where Detective Emily (hypothetical trademark pending) got to work through numerous Google searches to figure it out!

It started really with me just wanting to see if I could find any promo info for the second half of episodes that aired on Jetix, and while I did find out that the series believe it or not, aired on Jetix in Spain in 2005, what I also found was a snippet of an IGN review on Rotten Tomatoes:

And while some may find IGN to not be 100% valid, another website brought me to the review of someone who specifically mentions this:

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So my theory is… the series didn’t do so well, which is honestly a shame because the series is so great!.

But what I also find humorous are the major edits and what not of the dubbed in the first place!

I could see the whole “time constraints” reasoning, most episodes are about 20 minutes long, which is about the same length as a Gravity Falls episode when it aired on Disney, so it was a bit of the norm, plus I’m not sure how commercial breaks would’ve been done if the episode was awkwardly longer, like 22 minutes or so.

But to censor and edit certain parts because they “evoked emotion” or I guess “didn’t fit” the narrative they were trying to push, was pretty stupid, and with the show tanking like it did– it just makes all their work pointless!

But that’s besides the point, now we know why there’s 2 parts: poor ratings.

Finally, all that’s left to figure out, is why the first half was out of order to begin with.

You could continue the “narrative” path and say either the studio or the network put it that way to get the whole “Tobio” arc out of the way and jump straight into the action.

But I think the second half just shows us that [Sony] does have the ability to put the episodes in order!

I think because they were no longer at the mercy of a network, they either could or felt more able to put the second half of episodes in the right order, where as before they were either at the mercy of both (or either) Kids WB and Toonami to have the episodes in a specific order.

whether that was narrative pushing or not isn’t for me to make a definitive decision on, especially since there’s no solid information for me to go off of, but if you do have theories or whatnot about that specifically, feel free to let me know!

Other than that, unless multiple MAJOR things are found out, I’ll update this post as needed with any new info I either find or someone messages me about.

Thanks so much for reading, this has honestly been such a ride, but I’m here for it because I really enjoy digging into stuff like this.