Does anyone apart from me remember an eighties kids film called ‘D.A.R.Y.L.’ (short for ‘Data-Analysing Robot Youth Lifeform’)??? It starred the kid from ‘Neverending Story’, and was about a boy who thought he’d lost all memory of his previous existence, but later (much to his own surprise, presumably) actually turned out to be a cyborg at the centre of a top-secret government experiment into artificial intelligence and the capacity of machines to experience human emotion, in effect whether it was possible for an artificial android to become a “real boy”. Kind of like Pinocchio, but with robots.
Well, last night I dreamt I was a repeat experiment of the whole D.A.R.Y.L. saga, with myself not remembering anything of any previous existence, and therefore initially behaving in a totally unsocialised manner. However, while the Daryl child of the film betrayed his technological origins via the demonstration of Spock-like logic / mathematical genius / computer game expertise etc, I just basically ran riot, beating up the fellow siblings of my new adoptive family and just generally raising hell, until I eventually became socialized enough to act like a decent human being. Unlike the Daryl of the movie, however, who quickly learned to experience human emotions, I could only ever adapt to human life in an abstract moral sense, as opposed to developing any innate sense of feeling or humanity – in essence just an extreme manifestation of the generally “emotional crippled” (my mother’s words for my genetically repressed lineage) manner in which I currently live out my real-life existence… Not that it is any bad thing to think more with one’s head rather than heart I suppose, but still, it would be nice to at least have the choice…
Anyway moving back to happier territory, weren’t eighties films in general just great? They just don’t make them like the ‘Goonies’, ‘Karate Kid’, ‘Flight of the Navigator’, ‘Short Circuit’, ‘Dark Crystal’, ‘Big’, ‘Gremlins’, ‘Ghostbusters’, ‘Back to the Future’ and of course ‘E.T.’ any more – though watching David Bowie in the ‘Labyrinth’ now as an adult, you quickly realize why your mum was always so uncharacteristically keen to sit down and watch with you… Wonder if the kids who played Atreyu and Bastian Balthazar Bux in the movie have even the remotest idea that the Czech version of the classic ‘Neverending Story’ song still plays in certain renowned Prague nightclubs plays to this day….????? ;-))))))))
Well, last night I dreamt I was a repeat experiment of the whole D.A.R.Y.L. saga, with myself not remembering anything of any previous existence, and therefore initially behaving in a totally unsocialised manner. However, while the Daryl child of the film betrayed his technological origins via the demonstration of Spock-like logic / mathematical genius / computer game expertise etc, I just basically ran riot, beating up the fellow siblings of my new adoptive family and just generally raising hell, until I eventually became socialized enough to act like a decent human being. Unlike the Daryl of the movie, however, who quickly learned to experience human emotions, I could only ever adapt to human life in an abstract moral sense, as opposed to developing any innate sense of feeling or humanity – in essence just an extreme manifestation of the generally “emotional crippled” (my mother’s words for my genetically repressed lineage) manner in which I currently live out my real-life existence… Not that it is any bad thing to think more with one’s head rather than heart I suppose, but still, it would be nice to at least have the choice…
Anyway moving back to happier territory, weren’t eighties films in general just great? They just don’t make them like the ‘Goonies’, ‘Karate Kid’, ‘Flight of the Navigator’, ‘Short Circuit’, ‘Dark Crystal’, ‘Big’, ‘Gremlins’, ‘Ghostbusters’, ‘Back to the Future’ and of course ‘E.T.’ any more – though watching David Bowie in the ‘Labyrinth’ now as an adult, you quickly realize why your mum was always so uncharacteristically keen to sit down and watch with you… Wonder if the kids who played Atreyu and Bastian Balthazar Bux in the movie have even the remotest idea that the Czech version of the classic ‘Neverending Story’ song still plays in certain renowned Prague nightclubs plays to this day….????? ;-))))))))
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