Headscratchers / Peter and the Magic Egg

• What sect of Pennsylvania Dutch are the characters? They seem to be just a little too worldly to be Old Order Amish (they appear to have no problem with purely secular music and Peter even has a guitar; Papa Doppler says he doesn't have a tractor because he can't afford one, not because you're supposed to avoid modern machinery). Are they perhaps Mennonites?

• Just how much of a machine is/was Tobias Tinwhiskers? Papa Doppler's assertion that he "hired a plastic doctor and two motor engineers and got himself made mechanical altogether" suggests that modifications, perhaps rather extreme ones, were made to his human body. However, this seems to be contradicted in the end when the narrator says that "the magic laughter showed him that under it all, he was still Tobias Toot". As he laughs, the tin plates fall off him, revealing a fully human and clothed Tobias underneath, suggesting that it was just an exosuit. Was this the case or did the magic laughter also magically restore whatever physical humanity was removed from him (which does not seem to be implied by the narration), and if he was just in an exosuit all along, what role did the plastic surgeon have in his transformation?

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