My First Time … Watching ‘The Goonies’: It’s Not a Movie For Thirtysomethings

When I tell friends that I’ve got a Goonies-sized hole in my pop culture knowledge, I’m only being slightly untruthful. The movie, which turns 30 tomorrow, hit theaters just a year and a half after I was born. I don’t turn 32 for a few more months, and I’ve managed to go most of my life without seeing Richard Donner’s comedy about a ragtag group of teens who seek out one last adventure before their grimey neighborhood, known as the Goon Docks, is razed to make way for a posh country club. Well, I hadn’t seen it all the way through.

The Goonies is one of those movies people get legitimately angry about when you tell them you haven’t seen it. Since college is known as a time to experiment, it was but one of the ’80s kids classics that was foisted upon me by my friends. I sat with a group of guys on a ratty couch in a dank living room, hoping the cheap beer would make the experience worthwhile. It wasn’t. I gave up after about fifteen minutes — far before the titular crew even met up with the evil Fratelli gang. In that brief fifteen minutes period, I had already gotten enough of my friends screaming along with every line and blasting the Cyndi Lauper song about the Goonies — the video for which the Goonies themselves watched on TV in some sort of meta inconsistency. (I was nineteen at the time and far more pedantic than I am now.)

With its upcoming anniversary, and considering my completely open mind as a reasoned adult man, I figured it was time to finally watch the movie from start to finish. And what I feared would happen came true: I didn’t like The Goonies. And it sort of bums me out.

I think if I were ten years old in 1985, I would have loved The Goonies. I’d probably love it if I were ten years old now, or if I had sat down to watch it when I was actually ten years old. But as a 31-year-old, it doesn’t do much for me. I can recognize its tight script, which pretty much set a standard for any adventure film geared toward kids around the age of the movie’s characters. I noticed the iconic shots — the images of the kids’ faces peering at the pirate map, the wide-eyed excitement that so frequently pops up in Spielberg movies (the famed director served as a producer on The Goonies, and has a story credit). And it’s impossible to ignore the super ’80s feel — Josh Brolin’s athletic gear, the Reagan-era class divide, the appearance of a Corey, and Ke Huy Quan’s shouting. I felt like I was watching a VH1 clip show, only less enjoyable because I wasn’t there to experience these nostalgic moments firsthand (and I didn’t get to hear Mo Rocca make a deadpan joke about watching it in the theater).

My general aversion toward The Goonies — and my ambivalence to it after watching it for the first time in my thirties — is two-fold. For one, I somehow avoided it until the time I was too old to appreciate it. On top of that, I can’t feel the nostalgia others feel as they watch it for the fifth, tenth, or twentieth time as an adult. I’m sure there are other movies that I love solely because they represent a glowing period in my youth that I can’t achieve ever again — The Princess Bride, for one, or perhaps even The Neverending Story. Would I enjoy them as much as I do if I didn’t see them as a kid, if I couldn’t picture the wonder I felt as a child watching these movies? I doubt it.

For many cultural touchstones, there’s a specific window in which to truly enjoy and understand an artistic endeavor. It transcends genre and artistic platforms, as my experiences with The Catcher in the Rye prove. I’ve never finished the book, simply because I was too young for it the first time I read it, not able to really grasp the concepts of teen angst at the age of ten, and too old when I picked it up again as a jaded college student. Meanwhile, I read The Bell Jar and The Perks of Being a Wallflower in high school, and jeez, did those books affect me in the way The Catcher in the Rye might have if I had picked it up at the right time. I wonder how I would respond to them if I read them at any other age.

Part of growing up, and missing out on a collective childhood experience, requires the ability to avoid a cultural FOMO. I didn’t get to see The Goonies for some unknown reason when I should have, and seeing it now left me underwhelmed. But that’s OK, because it’s not a movie for me — not the current me, anyway. It exists, though, for at least two generations of adults who did see it as kids and get to feel that rush of nostalgia for a movie from their youth. As for me, I have plenty of others that do the same thing… even if they didn’t come accompanied by a slick Cyndi Lauper jam.

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Photos: Everett Collection