Revisiting D.A.R.Y.L. Part III

I turn to Roger Ebert’s 1985 review, where the late great film critic makes this reflection:

D.A.R.Y.L. is a sort of Charly in reverse. Instead of a retarded man who is allowed, through science, to have a brief glimpse of what it would be like to be normal, what we have here is a super-intelligent thinking machine who gets a taste of being a real little boy. It’s an intriguing premise, and the movie handles it with skill.

I concur with Ebert’s opinion that Daryl’s relationship with his new best friend Turtle is central to the “Pinocchio” character’s evolution into a “real boy”:

They know there is something odd about the kid when he starts doing his own laundry. That’s not natural for a grade-schooler. Daryl has some other strange attributes. He is unfailingly polite, obsessively honest and bats 1,000 in Little League [a fact I, Joe the Mailman pointed out earlier]. Finally his friend, Turtle, pulls him aside and explains that adults don’t like it when a kid is too perfect. It makes them nervous. They need to connect with him so they can relax around him. Daryl nods gravely, and his next time at bat, he strikes out.

If Daryl is a proverbial Pinocchio, then the character of Turtle represents the conscience. This refreshingly unusual and interesting, in that Turtle, who is portrayed as a typical ten-year-old—mischievous and adventurous, is in many ways the kind of scamp that the original Pinocchio is described as by Carlo Collodi. Daryl, by way of contrast, is what I call the reverse-Pinocchio. It is as if the characters have mashed up.  

I refer to University of Chicago professor Rebecca West’s lengthy examination of Collodi’s original serialized novel:

Collodi's tale of Pinocchio may have fairy tale-like qualities that tie it to the genre of children's literature, but many of its elements are more allied to the tradition of adult, "serious" prose fiction. Its main personages, for example, have rather bad characters, unlike the unerringly good heroes and heroines of fairy tales. Pinocchio is transgressive and selfish for most of the tale; Geppetto is very hot-tempered; Ciliega (Mr. Cherry) drinks much too much; and the Blue Fairy is quite hard-hearted and often does not display much affection for the puppet. Moreover, the tale is set in a provincial Tuscany that was quite recognizable to readers when it first appeared, a world made up of everyday problems, among which was getting enough to eat. This is not at all the utopian world of typical fairy tales, in which material problems can be overcome by magic and everyone lives happily ever after…The dynamism of the action as it unfolds horizontally is much more important than deep psychological or extensive descriptive elements; the story itself is the thing, in short. As in many fairy tales, in Pinocchio too it is the overcoming of obstacles that pushes the tale forward, so that the hero or heroine may be rewarded with the happy ending…In order to understand better the qualities that make of the puppet's tale something much more complex than a simple fairy tale-like story of goodness and obedience rewarded…