The first series in the mecha genre was Mitsuteru Yokoyama's 1956 manga "Tetsujin 28-go" (which was later animated in 1963 and also released abroad as "Gigantor"). He was inspired to become a manga creator by Osamu Tezuka, and began serializing the manga in "Shonen", an iconic boy's magazine, in 1956. In this series, the robot, which was made as a last-ditch effort to win World War II by the Japanese military, was remote-controlled by the protagonist Shotaro Kaneda, a twelve-year-old detective and "whiz kid". The story turned out to have immense mass appeal, and inspired generations of imitators.