Apologies if there was already a board for this. Moving on...

This is one of my favorite 80s nostalgia movies... even if I was only three when it came out. But it's funny, makes full use of the Oregon setting, and David Grusin's score is great (and the Cyndi Lauper songs are kind of fun too ).

But on to the nits:

Where did One-Eyed Willy's pirate ship come from? Since when do pirates - with Spanish treasure maps no less - hang around the Pacific Northwest? (The whole pirate angle would make a lot more sense had they movie been set, say, here in Nova Scotia. )

Just how much money was needed to pay off the evil developers? Could that handful of jewels really cover it?

Chunk says Sloth is going to come live with him at the end... do his parents know/approve of that?

Some observations:

Sloth's musical theme was originally composed by Max Steiner (the guy responsible for the music of Gone with the Wind among others).

Sean Astin was really thin when he made this movie. I must say that he looks a lot healthier now! (see LOTR)

Actually, at the end of the novelization of this film, there's an afterword to the effect that not only does Sloth go to live with Chunk, but he converts to Judaism and celebrates his bar mitzvah!

Um, Sam was supposed to be a "silly fat hobbit" for that series. I think Sean Astin is normally thinner.

Where did One-Eyed Willy's pirate ship come from? Since when do pirates - with Spanish treasure maps no less - hang around the Pacific Northwest? (The whole pirate angle would make a lot more sense had they movie been set, say, here in Nova Scotia. - Josh Gould

This doesn't stretch credulity as much as Mouth's rhymed translations, IMHO.


I think Sean Astin is normally thinner. - Influx

Post-Goonies Sean has always been a little on the husky side.

I didn't see this movie when it first came out because I thought it looked kind of lame. (I went to Cocoon instead.) A couple years later in college, I saw it on VHS, and loved it! This is just a fun film, and reminds me of adventures my friends and I would pretend to embark upon when we were kids.

Did anyone noticed the line near the end "The octopus was scary!" and wonder 'what octopus'? I know it was filmed, but cut before release, and the novelization retains the scene. Has it been restored for the dvd release? It's not in my 12" laser disc.

Speaking of the novelization, there's a nice scene before the discovery of the pirate ship, where the characters retell the story "The Monkey's Paw." Probably wouldn't have worked well in the film (if it was even scripted at all), but it's a nice interlude in the book.

Did anyone noticed the line near the end "The octopus was scary!" and wonder 'what octopus'? I know it was filmed, but cut before release, and the novelization retains the scene. Has it been restored for the dvd release? It's not in my 12" laser disc.

The octopus indeed appears in one of the deleted scenes on DVD. It's a pretty lame scene.

The dvd is brilliant. If you ever wanted to know what the gang look like now, watch the commentary, as they filmed it! Sean Astin introduces himself as "a well fed Sean Penn" so I suspect he was filming LOR at the time.
The deleted scenes are great (and yes, the octopus scene is a little lame).
It's one of my favourite films from my childhood, they just don't make them like that anymore- as far as I know, there is not ONE cg effect.

...there is not ONE cg effect.

I concur; this was made in the pre-CGI days, when effects were done optically.

Rodney Hrvatin: If you ever wanted to know what the gang look like now, watch the commentary...
Luigi Novi: Or, you could just check out this pic.

About the idea of pirates in Oregon, why not? Pirates were not required just to loot and pillage the Atlantic; Sir Francis Drake sure didn't limit himself to it. One-Eyed Willie could have fought his huge battle with the English navy in the Atlantic, sailed around Africa or South America afterwards, and switched his focus to attacking the Spanish in the Pacific. The part that is really hard to figure out would be why he went to all the trouble of hiring a crew and provisioning a ship, sailing thousands of miles to steal a huge amount of treasure, and then instead of spending it, sealing it and himself in a cave somewhere. The only way I could account for it is by a consideration outside the story. The movie intends Willie to be a larger-than-life character. He is supposed to have fought the greatest navy of his day to a draw, traveled halfway around the world, stole one of the largest treasures ever taken by a pirate, rigged a cave with traps that still work well over 300 years later, then slew his entire crew singlehandedly and entombed himself in the cave, so that the ship and the crew's bodies were mostly intact centuries later. Considering all this, the accomplishment of a group of scared, desperate kids finding it in the name of saving their homes, doing what centuries of experts could not, becomes even more epic.

re: Pirates in Oregon
Read this story; it gives Goonies slightly more credibility.

http://www.unexplainedearth.com/neahkahnie.php

Couldn't Willie have originally written his clues in English before translating them into Spanish?

Here's one of my favourite nits - and quite a substantial one at that!

One of the last obstacles encountered by the gang in the tunnels is the pipe organ made of bones. Correctly playing the line of musical notes on the reverse of the map (VERY hard to spot in any other scenes, by the way!) somehow causes the exit door to open; playing wrong notes causes the cavern floor to fall away.

In the first place, one has to wonder whence cometh the supply of wind for this organ. In this day and age, pipe organ blowers are electrically powered; pre-electricity, there would either be an under-floor system involving water pressure (such instruments date back to Ancient Greece and were known as 'hydraulis') or somebody would have to pump a set of bellows. We see from the numerous collapses of the cavern floor that its a long way down before one finds any water in there; such distance would also make it very impractical to build a hydraulis mechanism (remember, these Pirates were working without power tools...). And obviously no-one could hang around to pump the organ by hand!

Secondly, the sound the instrument makes deserves scrutiny. (Apologies for getting technical here; I'll try and explain as best I can!)

On a typical organ, there will be several ranks of pipework, each rank consisting of different kinds of pipe - wood or metal, chimney-shaped or trombone-shaped with reeds. The ranks can be played singly or combined with each other, and the sound one usually hears in church when the organ is accompanying congregational singing is the sound of several diapason and principal ranks in different octaves, high and low pitches all at once. The Pirates' bone instrument makes such a "stereotypical organ sound" in this scene. Only problem is: it only appears to have ONE rank of pipes! These would only make sounds in one octave and they would (from the look of the pipes) be thick 'fluty' sounds. (I should also point out that the character plays chords with only a few notes in them, but what we hear sounds like very dense chords that could only be made by pressing down notes with all ten fingers on both hands.

There's also a point near the end of the scene where the character gets into a panic:

"Is it an A sharp - or a B flat?"

This of course sets up Sean Astin's character with a punchline: "If you hit the wrong note, we'll all be flat..." but in basic musical terms it's a non-starter. The organ sounds as if the Pirates tuned it to an equal temperament - why they would is a mystery, since equal temperament only came into being in the late eighteenth century and was standardised in the nineteeth. In modern equal temperament, A sharp and B flat are exactly the same note. End of story!

(I realise it's pretty deep-level nitpicking, but there you go - I'm a professional musician and you can probably guess which instrument I specialise in........!)

Some more nits

The kids travel underground...

- below the fireplace
- below sewer pipes
- Down a hole that one of the kids (inspector gadget wanna be) survives
- down a water slide... a long one where they go down some distance

finally, they get to sea level where the ship is... I'm not familiar with the location of the criminal's hideout, but I'm thinking that the pirate ship inside the cave should be below sea level.

-----------

Speaking of the cave the pirate ship is in, there's an awful lot of light in the cave. So much light that it should be easy to see the pirate ship from the surface, that is, the ground. How did this ship remain hidden if it can be seen from the surface?

-----------

The water slide is what, a few hundred years old? How much mold and mildew would be on the slide? I'd expect to see the kids coated in a green slimey mess when they finished it.

-----------

Speaking of the water slide they slide down, Andy appears to be wearing a cheerleaders outfit? I'm not sure what she's wearing, only that its shorter than TOS women's uniforms and it looks like you can see her underwear. The nit in this is that I'd think sliding down a uneven, slimey rock slide would tear underwear... or at least give a very painful wedgie.

-----------

NANJAO

The water slide has one entrance and multiple exit points. Judging by how fast the kids were sliding down the water slide, I'd hate to think what would become of someone if they managed to impact the divider that splits the exit points.

-----------

The wishing well the kids find themselves at the bottom of shows its a good distance down. I highly doubt that someone could throw one of the coins or something back out of the well to the surface. Not to mention the trajectory that the item thrown out takes.

-----------

Sloth's been tied up for some time right? How does someone maintain that strength when one is unable to exercise of lift weights?

-----------

The kids find a bunch of sticks a dynamite and use them as candles midway in the movie. Shouldn't they have exploded? They look like they're behaving as candles not sticks of dynamite.

When will The Goonies 2 be coming out

How does never sound? Goonies 2, as well as Lethal Weapon 5, died when director Richard Donner did.
This site isn't Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood, Jeff. There is something out there called "Google". It will perform a very thorough search almost instantaneously. Try it; you'll like it.

Don't bother trying to make Winters see reason, Adam. It's hopeless. Many here have tried and failed.

And don't bother asking Winters to do is own research. It's too much like work.

Sean Astin has an idea for a Goonies sequel where the kids of the original Goonies band together for some reason but I doubt it will ever get off the ground.

Mind you- if they can make Indiana Jones and Darn Kids On My Lawn then I guess anything is possible these days.

What's the point?

It's been nearly 40 years now, since Goonies came out. None of the coveted movie audience, late teens through early 20's, were even alive then.

It's too late.