BLAIR: So Chester Copperpot’s ingenious, inventive archeology got him as far as the subbasement beneath the town country club.
GLASS: I think the moral of this story is that teamwork is more effective than going it alone. Some of us had to learn that the hard way.
BLAIR: Hey, that’s a Lou Gehrig baseball card they just pulled out of Copperpot’s satchel. And dynamite.
GLASS: With the word “dynamite” written on the side. The Goonies think they’re candles. Poor Chester Copperpot. It looks like a gigantic rock dropped from the ceiling and crushed him.
BLAIR: Now what does Samwise find? A trip wire.
GLASS: Which he pulls.
BLAIR: Another ingenious device. Look at this.
GLASS: One-Eyed Willie was a Goonie, too.
BLAIR: Contraptions! He was a Goonie!
GLASS: That’s a main part of being a Goonie. Right up there with creative dissembling, a penchant for exploration, and quick access to dynamite. I can’t believe that Chester Copperpot fell for this.
BLAIR: I can’t either. This falling-rock “trap” takes about twenty minutes to get started. But I think Christopher Columbus was writing from experience here.
GLASS: And now Chunk is telling the story of how he once spilled fake puke on everyone in a movie theater—how it was his fault that he made everyone throw up on themselves. I’ve felt responsible for things that had similar ends myself.
BLAIR: Hey—I think they’re really going to chop his hand off in that blender, man.
GLASS: Look, you need to calm down. The bats come shooting out of the cave and into the restaurant, and they stop. Chunk’s saved, okay?
BLAIR: And what do the Goonies find here?
GLASS: They find the town’s wishing well.
BLAIR: So Chester Copperpot could have basically climbed down that well and gotten just as far—farther, in fact—than he did by starting out at the old restaurant.
GLASS: Again, the Goonies begin plundering. This time, an innocent wishing well.
BLAIR: Until Martha fucking Plimpton lectures them not to. These coins are people’s dreams, she says. But Mouth doesn’t listen. “This one was my dream, my wish, so I’m taking them back. I’m taking them all back.” Mouth: our moral teacher.
GLASS: And, once again, Chunk and the mutant. I think we need to discuss the mutant.
BLAIR: Sloth, you mean. He has a name.
GLASS: Right, Sloth. He really is one of the more mysterious characters in this film.
BLAIR: Sloth looks like a Mad Ball. You remember Mad Balls?
GLASS: No, I don’t, but my point—
BLAIR: Mad Balls were those balls that didn’t bounce because had these crazy, lopsided faces on them. Jesus.
GLASS: All right, whatever. Listen up now. This is a big speech Samwise is about to make, a reveille for Goonies everywhere. I used to watch this when I worked in the video store and it kept me going during my darkest days.
BLAIR: Wait. Is this the speech—the “down here, up there” speech?
GLASS: I prefer to call it “The Wishing Well Address.”
BLAIR: Listen to that Hobbit, man: “The next time you see sky, it could be over another town. The next time to take a test, it’ll be in some other school. Our parents, they want the bestest stuff for us. But right now they got to do what’s right for them, ‘cause it’s their time—their time, up there. Down here, it’s our time. It’s our time down here. That’s all over the second we ride up Troy’s bucket.”
GLASS: Oh, it’s beautiful.
BLAIR: Goddamn it. I’ll get you a Kleenex.
GLASS: Troy’s friends, laughing as they’re pulling up the well’s bucket and thinking Kerri is in it, don’t realize they’re actually just pulling up an empty bucket with a letterman sweater draped over it.
BLAIR: I think they’re all lit, man. All three of them, Troy and his buddies. It explains their shaky grasp of weights and measures, as well as Troy’s overreacting. He goes insane. “Andy!” he yells. “You Goonie!” What is that all about, anyway?
GLASS: Something troubles me deeply about Sloth.
BLAIR: The Baby Ruth scene!
GLASS: Chunk hits Sloth in the face with a thrown Baby Ruth. This is bizarre. This is kind of nightmarish. Sloth goes crazy over the Baby Ruth and breaks his chains. Then they bond over their incredible appetites.
BLAIR: Yeah, they’ve got that, don’t they?
GLASS: Size. A love of Baby Ruth candy bars.
BLAIR: They’re feeding each other, and Sloth kisses Chunk on the lips. You could go to prison for that today.
GLASS: Just imagine what Sloth must smell like.
BLAIR: I don’t mean to keep on this, but what have we seen? Dead bodies, genetic mutants inappropriately handling children, a lot of kissing.
GLASS: Wanton teenage sexual activity, crude sexual metaphors posing as a pirate’s name.
BLAIR: Are any of us surprised that all of One-Eyed Willie’s traps still work?
GLASS: It’s a bit like that game, Mousetrap. Do you remember that game?
BLAIR: Yeah, but I never really actually played it. I always considered it a racist game.
GLASS: Here’s a really big pit that Short Round falls into, but his novelty-teeth-Slinky-attachment saves him before he’s impaled on all these spikes.
BLAIR: And back at the restaurant Chunk is calling the police. But because he’s played so many pranks before, the sheriff doesn’t believe him. Why? Just because Chunk has an established pattern of deception? But that’s a fallacy. Sometimes liars tell the truth.
GLASS: Statistically speaking, they almost have to.
BLAIR: Oh, man, the famous Goonie peeing sequence. Samwise calls one cave the little boys’ room and one cave the little girls’ room. But then Brand goes into his own cave.
GLASS: That’s right. “The men’s room.”
BLAIR: That Kerri—she’s a sex maniac. All she ever wants to do is French kiss! And she makes out with Samwise by accident! Do you remember dreaming that this would happen to you?
GLASS: What, that a hot cheerleader would make out with me in a cave before a waterfall backdrop while we were chasing after a mysterious pirate’s rich stuff?
BLAIR: Yeah.
GLASS: No.
BLAIR: Do you remember how electrifying this scene was when you were a kid?
GLASS: Wow, the Fratellis are making quick work of tracking the Goonies. They caught right up!
BLAIR: They didn’t have Kerri to slow them down with a jones to French every twenty-five feet.
GLASS: The chase is on—the Fratellis hot on the Goonies’ trail, into another giant skull. Now, if I remember correctly, the Fratellis destroy their manhoods in this scene.
BLAIR: Yeah, Short Round squirts oil all over the log they have to cross to get into the other cave. “Slick shoes!”
GLASS: That is a spectacular stunt.
BLAIR: Yes, Cypher Fratelli crushing his gonads. That is a good stunt. What’s this? The bone-organ?
GLASS: This might One-Eyed Willie’s most ingenious contraption: constructing a working pipe organ out of human bones. All those pulley-based traps are one thing, but to make an actual working musical instrument out of bones . . .
BLAIR: Which implies access to a positively Cambodian number of skeletons.
GLASS: One-Eyed Willie killed all of the men on his boat, remember, after he found the treasure, the rich stuff.
BLAIR: But who killed him?
GLASS: He just died, I think.
BLAIR: Just sat down and died?
GLASS: Consumed by his own greed.
BLAIR: Wow. That’s an amazing fucking story.
GLASS: Yeah. It’s a haunting, haunting thing.
BLAIR: Do you think Christopher Columbus knew One-Eyed Willie?
GLASS: If he didn’t know him, he understood him.
BLAIR: One-Eyed Willie wrote music too! He wrote his own little song on the back of Samwise’s map.
GLASS: It’s pleasant to think of One-Eyed Willie, during his lonely days of being trapped in a cave, finding solace by playing a human bone organ.
BLAIR: So the implication here is that the notes, the key that the organ is played in, opens a large stone door little by little. One-Eyed Willie was Edison, Mozart, a bloodthirsty pirate, and Einstein rolled into one, basically.
GLASS: This One-Eyed Willie technology—it’s so tragic that, when he died, it died with him.
BLAIR: Kerri’s playing the metatarsals. I don’t know if the metatarsals correspond to actual piano keys or what.
GLASS: Meanwhile Short Round hits Cypher in the face with a spring-loaded boxing glove. He’s been walking around for the whole movie with a boxing glove in his jacket!
BLAIR: The door opens! And the Goonies escape!
GLASS: Into a working waterslide.
BLAIR: I remember that, as a kid, this was exciting.
GLASS: This is pretty great. There’s a puckish, Michael Jackson-like quality to One-Eyed Willie.
BLAIR: I wonder how many children died looking for waterslides underneath their towns and cities? I think that’s worth investigating.
GLASS: A handsome galleon they ultimately find, though.
BLAIR: It is. A very handsome galleon.
GLASS: They’re up on it now. Do you think Mouth has got his dreams back?
BLAIR: He doesn’t need them. He jacked that fountain.
GLASS: Then he did get his dreams back.
BLAIR: I doubt it, actually. If it was that easy, I would have done it weeks ago. Here’s Kerri stumbling upon another corpse, with daggers shoved in its sockets. Now, I have to say this: What is the theme established over and over again in this movie? Chunk breaks things—only to lead into more adventure. Short Round falls through the floor—into the very secret passage they’re looking for. Bad things happen, yes. But sometimes “bad” things are, in fact, good.
GLASS: You think? That hasn’t really been my experience.
BLAIR: Just because something bad happens to you—your career is ruined, your reputation is annihilated, your life is destroyed—all it means is that you’ve stumbled into another secret chamber full of rich stuff. Like Short Round here, when he falls into the ship’s secret chamber.
GLASS: A window closes, in other words, but a door opens. And that door might be a movie made about your experience, or it might be begging Steve Croft not to humiliate you in the editing process, or it might be writing anonymous reviews of your own book on Amazon.com.
BLAIR: They just found the secret room where One-Eyed Willie locked himself. Is there a nautical term for whatever this room is called? I consider this whole period of human history to be fairly racist so I don’t really know.
GLASS: You consider a period of history racist?
BLAIR: One-Eyed Willie was a slaver.
GLASS: I think he just entombed himself in his cabin, so he would be surrounded by his riches.
BLAIR: Do you think he killed himself? Do you think One-Eyed Willie died of starvation? Or was he poisoned?
GLASS: It’s hard to say. I think he died by his own hand.
BLAIR: He’s a handsome skeleton, though.
GLASS: He’s got that dashing eye patch, a lovely kerchief.
BLAIR: Hey. This is just a thought, but have you ever pondered the fact that, one day, you’ll be a skeleton buried in the ground? Doesn’t that freak you right the fuck out?
GLASS: Here’s Samwise lifting One-Eyed Willie’s patch.
BLAIR: And then he has an asthma attack. Samwise says, “Well, One-Eyed Willie, we have a lot in common.” But unless he plans on murdering his fellow Goonies, I don’t see how that statement can be true, exactly.
GLASS: Is it more of a poetical statement, maybe?
BLAIR: That’s not the point. The point is, How appropriate is it for the Goonies to be idolizing a known mass murderer? I’m gonna say it: very appropriate. Maybe I shouldn’t say it. But I did. And I won’t apologize for it.
GLASS: This is where the orgy of greed over takes each Goonie.
BLAIR: Orgy?
GLASS: Figurative orgy.
BLAIR: Was there a Goonies II?
GLASS: No.
BLAIR: There wasn’t some straight-to-video Goonies II?
GLASS: I don’t think so.
BLAIR: Think about it: Goonies II: The Next New Generation. We should work on something like that. Together. Pitch it to Fox or something. Annie Wilkes could reprise his role.
GLASS: Except this time they encounter more things, darker things. Things that would flesh out all of the darker subtexts of this movie: the mutant-child eroticism, for instance.
BLAIR: Hey, we’re missing shit again. The Fratellis have raided the Goonies’—disappointingly figurative—orgy.
GLASS: I think the Fratellis screw up here. I would have just stuck a sword in all the Goonies’ ribs and pushed them overboard. Instead, they make them walk the plank.
BLAIR: Jesus! Annie Wilkes cuts Kerri’s arm and pushes her off the plank!
GLASS: But here comes Sloth swinging in with Chunk.
BLAIR: Captain Chunk. How did Chunk and Sloth find them, anyway? Did they take the waterslide or did they have another method?
GLASS: We missed that.
BLAIR: Very troubling reunification scene here between Throw Momma from the Train and Sloth, revealing the extent to which Sloth was abused as a boy. He is a boy, right?
GLASS: I think so. Sloth’s brothers try to get the drop on him, but he savagely knocks their heads together before they can. Sloth isn’t as dumb as he looks.
BLAIR: Meanwhile, in the water, Kerri and Brand French while she’s tied up. This is bondage!
GLASS: And the water is steaming.
BLAIR: Teenage bondage. This movie is awesome. Why have I been wasting all my time Googling “cheerleader bondage” when all I needed to do was rent The Goonies?
GLASS: Here’s the final confrontation between Sloth and Throw Momma from the Train. Again, I find this very troubling. “Mom, you were bad.” That’s what Sloth says. “It was for your own good.” Then he suddenly remembers being beaten by her.
BLAIR: Sloth touches his face as though remembering the specific trauma that made his melted face. Two words: Tripped. Out.
GLASS: But, you know, he gets closure on the whole episode by heaving his mother off the side of the boat. That’s what’s nice about this. Then he dives in.
BLAIR: The Goonies get away, but without any of the rich stuff. That happens, too, sometimes. A new opportunity presents the illusion of rich stuff but it just doesn’t materialize. But if you have a bag of marbles filled with jewels everything can turn out all right.
GLASS: This is where that Copperpot dynamite comes in handy. They use it to blow their way out of the cave. I think this movie literally made me sick as a boy.
BLAIR: Sick with fear?
GLASS: Sick with expectation and longing for some adventure like this to happen to me. Do you remember making up all these incredibly elaborate stories for your friends? Stories about tunnels under houses, and mutants? Do you remember that?
BLAIR: And they’d find that there were no tunnels or mutants or hot cheerleader bondage, and then they weren’t your friends anymore?
GLASS: I need a… moment. Just talk, all right?
BLAIR: Uh, look at Sloth here, nobly sacrificing himself for the Goonies. It’s a little like the way the one-eyed guy dies in Krull. That’s another very important movie for people our age. You better now?
GLASS: Yeah, thanks. Krull. That really did the trick.
BLAIR: Here the Goonies emerge from One-Eyed Willie’s cave onto a beach somewhere. I’m thinking… is this Mexico?
GLASS: I don’t think so, because all the Goonies’ parents are there.
BLAIR: We’re to understand that this whole adventure has taken one day.
GLASS: This is a very moving scene right here.
BLAIR: With Mouth and Martha Plimpton?
GLASS: All of this.
BLAIR: This is where Kerri comes onto Samwise again. Let’s analyze this. Kerri makes a veiled reference to Samwise’s manhood, and then she goes and makes out with Brand, right in front of him. This bitch is sending out some weird signals, man.
GLASS: But his asthma is cured.
BLAIR: You know, One-Eyed Willie died of asthma.
GLASS: And the Fratellis come up the beach, after being taken into custody off-screen. Notice something: Sloth assaults a police officer, makes out with a small boy, and is held up as an object of sympathy. Exactly what did we do wrong, I ask?
BLAIR: It’s a little funny that Troy’s dad would make Samwise’s dad sign over his property right after they’ve found their missing children. Why don’t they just move to a different part of Astoria?
GLASS: I know. Property values must be too high in Astoria. But it doesn’t matter, because Rosalita’s found the jewels in Samwise’s marble bag.
BLAIR: How much money could twelve jewels possibly bring in? That Lou Gehrig baseball card would have been worth way more.
GLASS: One-Eyed Willie’s boat is still sea-worthy after 400 years, though. And it looks as though the sun is setting.
BLAIR: Yeah. They’re in Maine.
GLASS: No, listen. See how the sun is setting to the west there? So, they must be on the west coast. Unless that’s the sun rising. It’s very confusing.
BLAIR: Hey, the credits.
GLASS: Anne Ramsey! That’s the guy who played Mrs. Fratelli, you idiot! Not Annie Wilkes! Annie Wilkes was the nurse in Misery.
BLAIR: Who was played by Anne Ramsey, an Academy Award-winning actor. Bill Bradley played Bill, it says. The Bill Bradley?
GLASS: Must be.
BLAIR: I interviewed him once.
GLASS: Me too.
BLAIR: At least, I said I did.
GLASS: Yeah. Me too.