The Goonies: That Pirate Film

The Goonies is a film all about nostalgia. I am one of a legion of people who grew up with this movie in the 1980s and got hooked into its whimsical adventure. Every element of the film has a remarkable sticking quality, from the Cindy Lauper songs to the name of the Pirate leader, One Eyed Willy. This is an instance in which memorable characters and situations make up for a lack of top-notch filmmaking.

"The Goonies" are a group of kids who live in coastal Washington and decide to spend their last Saturday together before their houses are lost to a local developer. Here we find a menagerie of stars who were either huge in the 1980s or would become huge in their adult movie-making lives. Corey Feldman adds the "I love the 80s" blow comb swagger to the part of Mouth, and Sean Astin (who would later play Sam in the Lord of the Rings) protrudes a sense of adventure as Mikey that we all felt as kids. The Goonies stumble upon a map to buried pirate treasure and begin a quest to get the loot and save their house. Along the way they'll have to evade a band of thugs as well as the booby-trapped tunnels of the pirate caves.

The characters carry The Goonies out of mediocre kid-fare. Who can forget the awkward fat kid in the group, Chunk, performing a blubber shaking dance on a tree stump to get his friends to allow him entrance? What about Sloth, the overgrown monstrosity of a man with a heart of gold and a passion for Baby Ruths? Anyone who has seen The Goonies remembers these characters vividly and I think I can speak for them when I say that the kids hardly ever fail to elicit a laugh.

Richard Donner adds elements of adventure that seem cool even today, including falling pirate rock traps and a passage that allows entrance only if one plays the proper musical notes. All of us who have seen the movie WANTED to go on that kind of adventure, even though we knew in the back of our minds that nothing could quite measure up to finding real pirate treasure. Some of it is hammy, sure. But this movie stands as a reminder that there's a spirit of adventure in all of our own ragtag groups of friends, and Goonies never say die.