The Secrets of The Goonies

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SCR199: Some movies you don’t rewatch so much as fall back into. The Goonies is one of them, and four decades on it still draws thousands of fans every summer to the real filming locations in Astoria, Oregon.

Dom Bettinelli, Rob Leonardi, and Patrick Mason go back to Richard Donner’s 1985 treasure hunt from three directions. Dom saw it as a Gen X kid around its theatrical release. Rob first watched it in eighth-grade science class, of all places. Patrick grew up on the TV-syndication cut, where every curse got swapped for “shoot,” so the original held a few surprises.

That profanity is where the conversation starts. 1985 kids’ movies cursed a lot more than we remember, and it hits differently when you’re watching with your own children.

From there the panel gets at what actually holds the film together. Patrick’s theory: The Goonies takes an ordinary world and turns the ridiculousness up from a 6 to a 7, then never resets. The Rube Goldberg gate, Data’s gadgets, the water-fountain pipes, a jailbreak that opens on a Keystone Cops car chase. Nothing quite obeys physics, and the movie is happier for it.

Underneath the zaniness sits something quieter. Mikey believes his father’s tall tale about One-Eyed Willie because “my dad tells me the truth,” and that childlike faith is where the film’s innocence comes from. His speech at the wishing well, “down here it’s our time,” is the emotional and spiritual heart of the whole thing: one last adventure before the group scatters and childhood ends.

The cast is its own time capsule. Sean Astin before he was Sam Gamgee, Josh Brolin before he was Thanos, Ke Huy Quan long before his comeback, and John Matuszak, a 6-foot-8 former Raider, buried under a five-hour Sloth makeup rigged with an animatronic eye.

Dom, Rob, and Patrick also work through how a movie full of bloodthirsty counterfeiters and dead bodies stays a kids’ movie (it keeps the real violence off screen, the way Home Alone does), how much Stranger Things and Star Wars: Skeleton Crew borrowed from the Goonies template, and whether the sequel Warner Bros. confirmed in 2025 can hold that tone or just live off the original.

Hey, you guys. It’s still worth the trip.

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