A robot cat from the future shows up to fix a kid's life and immediately makes everything worse in exactly the right way. Doraemon's gadgets are doorways to chaos, not solutions, and watching Nobita stumble through consequence after consequence while this malfunctioning machine fumbles alongside him is the whole point. The show knows neither of them will ever actually change, so it just lets them be impossibly, reliably themselves across a hundred small disasters that somehow feel warm instead of mean.

Nobita Nobi is so hapless that his bumbling in the 20th century has left his descendants poor even in the 22nd century. Hoping to lift the family's standing, their servant Doraemon, a robotic cat, decides to travel back in time and steer Nobita toward a luckier path. The trouble is that Doraemon, a faulty robot the family came by accidentally but kept anyway, is hardly in better shape than Nobita. The robot cat takes Nobita on one adventure after another, and his life becomes far more exciting, though whether it is actually improving the way Doraemon intended remains an open question. The mix of adventure, comedy and fantasy gives the 1973 TV run a playful, lighthearted feel. Most of its episodes are now lost after a fire destroyed the film prints, and only 21 of the 52 segments are known to survive.