GOOFIES

THE GOONIES (1985)
dir: Richard Donner

I have Goonies in my "Top 15 Movies People Born After 1970 Should Be Punched In the Face For If They Bring Up" list even though I didn't think it was so bad seeing it for the first time last week. It still stays on the list though. There are a couple films on it I actually like, maybe I just have PTSD about the 80s. I think the reason X-ers like it is because it's about kids going out and having an adventure on their own. All this talk about "you couldn't do that today" when people see something from last century like a racial slur or women treated badly gets annoying, (I know. I do it too. I just don't believe in the fear tactic they call "cancel culture") but the ultimate "you couldn't do that today"-ism is unsupervised children. The free-range children of my generation turned out okay, not being a parent myself I can't figure out what caused this current stranger danger.

GOOFIES
MAD #258, October 1985
w: Stan Hart
a: Jack Davis

Sean Astin is Mikey Walsh, leader of a group that calls themselves "The Goonies". He's an asthmatic. His friends are Data (Ke Huy Quan) who always has gadgets on him, Chunk (Jeff Cohen), the fat kid who eats a lot, and Mouth (Corey Feldman), the smart-ass multilinguist. The older kids are Mikey's brother Brandon (Josh Brolin), and girlfriend Andi (Kerri Green). Missing is Andi's tomboyish best friend Stef (Martha Plimpton). I think the guy on the end is producer Steven Spielberg.

The movie begins with a bank robbery that Chunk is the only one to witness. The parody plays up his Judaism, though I don't recall any mention of it in the film. At the Walsh household, all the Goonies convene depressed that it's their last day together, because the development they all live in is about to be foreclosed on and torn down by new developers. They look at the Walsh family's collection of antiques in the attic.

They discover a treasure map. Brandon tells them it's just a legend, and they tie him up while they go look for it. The parody leaves out the scene where Brandon and Mikey's mother comes back home, frees him, and he goes after them. This is the part they don't use:

Andi goes to apologize for Troy's behavior. [unused footage out...] They see on the treasure map that it's hidden underground, but they have to go through a dilapidated old restaurant to get to it. The restaurant is actually a hideout for the bank robbers from the beginning, and the criminals put on the charade of being a real restaurant when the kids enter, with Mama Fratelli (Anne Ramsey), matriarch of the crime gang, acting as the waitress. When she leaves after "taking their order", the kids poke around.

Chunk is caught while trying to tell the police what he sees and is and about to be killed by Mama Fratelli and her two sons (Joe Pantaliano, Robert Davi) but they spare him, and lock him in the basement with their third son, a brain damaged, deformed guy named Sloth (John Matuszak). The kids, after going under the house, bypass all sorts of booby traps.

Eventually, the Goonies reach the pirate ship on the map, and are almost defeated by the Fratelli family, but Chunk and Sloth swoop in at the last minute, emulating Errol Flynn like they just saw on TV when they were locked in the basement. Everyone resurfaces on land and the parents are all there, happy to be reunited with the children, then the developers show up to foreclose on the house, but the families don't have to go because of the gems found on the hidden ship, which is now seen sailing away in the distance. And the teenagers make out.

This was the German edition, which used the movie on their cover.