Obscure, but excellent,
cartoon from the early 60's. Its genesis was interesting: an British firm, upon seeing the success of
AstroBoy in America, decided that it was worth their while to try to duplicate
Tezuka's achievement by producing an anime-like series for the American market. In order to do this, they hired a
Hungarian, George Halas, whose previous credit had been an animation of
George Orwell's Animal Farm. (Being a refugee from
the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, he certainly had some definite ideas on that subject.) Apparently, one non-
Indo-European speaker was as good as another.
What he came up with was an interesting meditation on the theme of immigration: Dodo arrives on ZeroZero Island (where the Prime Meridian crosses the Equator, without human language, or knowlege of human customs, but an encyclopedic knowlege of math and science, similar to Halas's fellow countrymen, who included such luminaries as Pal Erdos and Andy Grove. He there meets Professor Fingers, an Oppenheimer (or Professor Utonium)-like sage who can translate his gibberish into English. (His previous attempts at changing space-time as we know it resulted in "rocket pockets", which allow him to put any number of large items inside without disturbing the lines of his suit. VERY Oppie!) Somehow Compy, the Computer Bird and a caveman get mixed up in this...
Not least of the virtues of this underpublicized series is the theme song:
Do-do, the Kid from Outer Space!
Dodo can gogo any place!
With antennas on his ears,
propellers on his heels,
he's a science-fiction pixie
from a strange atomic race,
Dodo, the Kid from Outer Space,
Dodo!