Atlas shows up across pretty much every Astro Boy series, but he's best known for his role in the 1980s and 2003 adaptations. In the original 1960s run, he barely appears—more of a throwaway villain than anything substantial.
The 1980s version is where Tezuka actually developed him into a proper character. Atlas was built from the same blueprints as Astro Boy himself (stolen by the crime boss Skunk), which is why his face resembles Astro's, though his design otherwise couldn't be more different—red body, gold hair, angular and imposing. What made him dangerous wasn't just his appearance; he had something called the Omega Factor, a device that let him break the fundamental rule of robotics: he could actually hurt humans. Early in the series, both Atlas and his robotic caretaker Livian get torn up in a battle. Rather than fix themselves back to their original forms, they rebuild into these hulking adult warrior versions. The series culminates with Atlas discovering he's Astro Boy's brother. In a classic redemption arc, he renounces his villain ways and sacrifices himself to save the world.
The 2003 anime takes things in a completely different direction. Here, Atlas was originally named Daichi and built as the robot son of Tokugawa, groomed to become the world's first robot CEO. Tokugawa starts out genuinely caring—he even throws Daichi a birthday party and gives him an atlas as a gift, promising they'd see the world from the moon together. But as work consumes him, he becomes emotionally absent, assuming that buying Daichi stuff covers all his needs. Starved for actual affection, Daichi leads a secret motorcycle gang while maintaining the "perfect son" facade at home. After Dr. Tenma rebuilds him, he tears through Tokugawa Industries in revenge until Astro Boy steps in. Later, when he's destroying his father's moon base, he finally sees Earth the way Tokugawa promised all those years ago—and that's enough to make him reconsider killing his father. He spends the rest of the series sarcastically calling Astro "brother," since they're both Tenma's creations.
The original Japanese backstory for Daichi is darker: he was a human kid who wanted to be a painter, but his father brutally shut that down, insisting art was worthless and that Daichi focus only on the family business. He died at eighteen in a space shuttle accident. The English dub cut all this—too many scenes of child abuse and deemed too bleak for American audiences.
Content compiled by AnimeList.moe from publicly available sources.
