Every morning before school my brother and I would watch 10 minutes of a movie, straight after waking up. They say familiarity breeds contempt, but for a scruffy pre-teen dipping his toe into the pool of pop cultural ephemera, familiarity bred a strange sense of euphoria. We must have watched The Goonies more than 400 times.
Our version of the film was recorded off television and included advertising breaks. It was an integral fixture of our morning movie rotation until, one terrible day, the trusty Ferguson Videostar decided to chew up the magnetic tape and leave us without one of the definitive Boy’s Own adventure movies of the 1980s. We also lost a bunch of random episodes of maudlin TV cartoon The Raccoons in the flame-out, but we were less upset about that.
As I sit down to re-watch, I feel some trepidation. What if, after all these years, this movie I knew by heart, line-by-line, beat-by-beat, doesn’t measure up to my fond memories? What if I feel a little awkward with the sight of Chunk standing on a log to perform the Truffle Shuffle? What if the notion of cheerleader Andy accidentally tongue-kissing diminutive scrapper Mikey instead of his buff older brother Brand doesn’t quite sit right? How will modern sensibilities respond to the treatment of Sloth, a hideously disfigured though always lovable character who is chained up in a cellar and fed on scraps? And, should alarm bells be ringing that this is the story of a gang of children who escape from their parents in search of a fallen pirate named One-Eyed Willy?
The film is a product of its time, but that’s also the thing that makes it great. It is a walking, talking time capsule – so indicative of a specific cultural and historical moment that only a mad crank would hold any modern taboos against it. And it still offers a pure rush of adolescent energy. Revisiting the film, it was hard not to be transported back to my childhood, but it was also very heartening to see that the characters, the jokes, the dress, the design, its delightful definition of friendship and all the little eccentric touches really have passed the test of time. So many movies ride on the archetypes forged by The Goonies that watching it again makes you feel like you’re going right back to the source.
There’s also a surprise waiting for me, as our amateur childhood recording didn’t include the opening credits and cut off the film’s final minute, probably the result of the Videostar’s rudimentary timer settings. So, revisiting the film now, for the first time in well over two decades, I have the strange experience of seeing these two fragments for the first time. And that is a thrill in itself.
I’m struck by how cool the title design is – a terrifyingly detailed pirate skull which morphs into the dot of the “i” in Goonies. Tonally, it tees up the film in a way I wouldn’t have predicted. But more importantly, here is the chance to catch up with the climax. The final scene involves much tying up of loose ends, people hugging, the necessary gooey platitudes, the ugly antagonists being packed off to jail, the goodies ramming pizza into their mouths. The moment I’d never seen, though, depicts the cast huddled into a tidy cliffside gang pose, glancing out to the glistening bay of Astoria, Oregon, as One-Eyed Willy’s antique schooner drifts out to sea. Even though I was worried by the fate of this rogue vessel, and the fact that the “rich stuff” will now probably be sluiced into local authority coffers, I did administer the requisite air punch.
I was not the only person in school to watch The Goonies religiously – my first close circle of playground friends did too. This afforded me the opportunity to re-enact scenes and trade lines of dialogue – my personal favourite, for some reason, was when Chunk starts playing with a plasma ball in Mikey’s attic and shouts out: “Laser beams!” But the iconic “Hey you guys!” was also heavy in the mix.
My deep sense of nostalgia for this movie means that I’ve also become a little protective of it. I’m glad that they never made a sequel, even though it was a significant commercial hit (although, there are rumours of one happening, pitched as a kind of reunion special). And I’m glad that no one has (yet) remade the film. Sure there have been a number of pretenders to the crown, but none of them captures its specific teen milieu or the idea of how being a child is all about building your own adventures and being really rude to adults. Seeing it again was lovely, and genuinely made me want to grab my pushbike and go for a wander in the sewers.
The Goonies is available now as part of Warner Bros’s eye-catching Iconic Moments Collection, available on Blu-ray and DVD
