Hacker Cinema
The Goonies
1985 · Film · 114 min
Directed by Richard Donner
Young teen Mikey Walsh and his friends set off on a quest to find Pirate One-Eyed Willie's treasure in hopes of saving their homes from demolition. However, on their quest to find the treasure, they run into a family of recently escaped criminals, determined to capture the kids and reach the treasure first.
8 positive19 neutralfrom 27 commenters
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30 comments on Hacker News
> But Star Wars is best when it's pulp adventure stuff.
This is the way. I saw the first Star Wars the week it opened as a tween and it rocked my world. Both SW and Raiders of the Lost Ark had a clear vision of building on the proven structure of the old B&W movie serials like Flash Gordon but updating them with modern storytelling tools and larger budgets. It was a truly great concept and then Empire raised the stakes higher and even better.
You're right that Mando Season 1 was an attempt to get back to the original concept and it got close. Skeleton Crew is perhaps the only other SW series where the core idea was to update a proven structure of the past in a pure and focused way - except it chose a different genre than 1930s serials. Initially I didn't know what to make of Skeleton Crew but once I got that it was building on the 1980s tween adventures like Goonies, I appreciated how it absolutely nailed what it was going for. My own kids are now older than Skeleton Crew's target audience, so it obviously wasn't for me but I applaud it as Disney's only other pure attempt at applying the 'big idea' that made OG SW great to another genre.
As a sci-fan who loved the original IP to the point of reverence, even bad Star Wars is usually at least interesting but it can also be frustrating when it evokes echoes of the OG by being set in the same universe without even trying to be great in the same ways as the OG. For example, Andor is unique in being a spin-off that is actually very good but I'd argue none of the things that make it so good require being set in the Star Wars universe. It might be even better if it had been unshackled from the rules of the Star Wars cinematic universe and was a new, original sci-fi IP.
The government and medical groups were advocating lower fat diets for CVD reasons, but among the mainstream it took hold overwhelmingly because it was seen as a mechanism for weight reduction or management. A gram of fat has twice the calories of a gram of protein or carbs, and this was widely repeated (yes, I was alive then). Similarly, if being fat was bad (and yes, it was viewed as very bad), then fat as a component of food must similarly be bad.
Obesity was obviously far less common, but concern about weight -- and note that weight standards were much, much tighter (see the women in virtually any 1980s movie, which today would be consider anorexic) -- was endemic culturally. Snackwells weren't being sold to middle age men, they were being sold overwhelmingly to younger office women paranoid about their weight, and it wasn't because they were concerned about their arteries. Low fat products overwhelmingly targeted weight loss, including such ad campaigns as the "special k pinch".
"Thus calories alone were less vilified."
I'm sorry, but this is simply ahistorical. Calories were *EVERYTHING* among a large portion of the population. What is your knowledge on the 1980s from, because it certainly isn't based upon observable reality.
In the 1980s, being slightly overweight made you the joke (like literally the joke, as seen from Chunk in the Goonies, and many parallels in other programs). As calories became cheaper and people's waists started bulging, it was an easy paranoia to exploit.
I see a lot of shade thrown at Kathleen Kennedy these days. Sure, some of the Star Wars movies under Disney haven't been great, but look at this resume. It's incredible. I'll save you the click and put some things she's been the executive producer of here: Poltergeist, E.T., IJ & Temple of Doom, Goonies, Back to the Future(I,II,III), Young Sherlock Holmes, The Money Pit, Empire of the Sun, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (jumping ahead to more recent stuff), Rogue One, Andor, Mandalorian, Ashoka, Skeleton Crew....
So yes, not everything has been a winner, but to say that having her name attached to something means it won't be good means that either A)you might not be informed about her resume or B)you have another reason you don't like her involvement with a project.
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0005086/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1_tt_0_nm_8_in_0_q_kathleen%2520kenedy
Airplane is a PG movie where there are literally tities and the finale involves a blowjob joke.
We can certainly discuss 1980s vs 2020s and how the Overton window has shifted. Boobs weren't as big of a deal in our past.
80s were also quite violent in our movies/media as well. It seems like everything has been clamped down.
I was surprised to see the dick of the David Statue get messed up in the children's movie 'The Goonies' for example. Apparently dicks weren't a big deal either even into the 90s.
Revenge of the Ninja
All the Chuck Norris movies
All the Schwarzenegger movies
Goonies
Flight of the Navigator
Revenge of the Nerds
It would be great if my kid was into the video games I was into as a kid, but I've kind of resigned myself to the fact that she's a different person, grew up in a different environment, has different expectations out of video games. You can't force someone to like something. Same with movies and music. I tried to get her into Harry Potter and Star Wars and the kid/teen movies I grew up with like The Goonies and Flight of the Navigator, but those movies just so old to this generation, and there's nothing in it for them to relate to.
It's like trying to get "11 year old me" into The Howdy Doody Show.
Glad to see that kindness is finally going viral.
I'm Gen X, raised feral like the rest. Movies like The Lost Boys, The Goonies and Explorers feel like biographies. We were vicious to one another before the arrival of political correctness in the early 90s, which received backlash like today's woke. But kindness is always on the right side of history.
I agree though about feeling like some kind of crass <expletive> around young people today. I have a hard time staying domesticated as I watch society crumble under the guise of gentrification. I just want to act out so badly sometimes, deface something, watch it all burn like the good old days, SLC Punk style. But the real punk is to be ruthlessly human to one another.
There's a certain thrill in sacrificing one's ego to help someone achieve their dreams that just can't be replaced. The biggest baddasses are teachers, nurses, your mom, and everyone knows it.
It pretty much was just like that (I was there). One of my favorite "biographical" movies that nobody's ever heard of is Explorers:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089114/
The "More like this" section at the bottom has some other goodies, although a bit campy: Flight of the Navigator, *batteries not included, Short Circuit, Harry and the Hendersons, etc. Mainstream movies like The Goonies and The Breakfast Club are uncannily accurate. My friends and I basically rode BMXs and played Nintendo and drank Mtn Dew by the pool while REM played on the radio. We had analogs for everything today except the internet and cell phones, and much of it was actually more functional (didn't require instructions). And politics was a joke back then, like it was common knowledge that Reaganomics would dismantle Social Security and leave no money for Gen X (which hadn't been named yet) but we were rapidly heading for the 2015 Back to the Future Part II where we'd have our own fusion reactors so it wouldn't matter anyway.
Oh and my friend had a VCR that could pause without jittering, because in most models the magnetic head had to move slightly to pick up a signal from the tape. My other friend had access to a Video Toaster (can't remember if it was at the A/V club or a local TV station) that could add words and FX. But really the best work had the smeary transitions where we pressed record. And mixtapes often had part of the radio station's jingle or missed the first few seconds of the song. Everything was a bit dreamier because we were doing original things ourselves, not watching other people do it on YouTube. That's probably what I miss most.
I disagree. "Adults are stupid and we have to fix everything for them, sometimes with them even working against us" is an old trope. It was common in the 90s, like with rugrats and pretty much every made for kids movie, but I'd argue it even goes back to movies like Goonies and matilda and Little Rascals.
The mid 2000s dystopia fest in young adult stuff is just follow the leader with Hunger Games. The oppression is used not for it's own sake, but because its an easy excuse for your teens to be more "mature" and more in control of their own lives. It's escapism for teens who think parents "just don't get us"
Probably what makes this most relevant to HN is that the film marks a triumphant return to acting for Ke Huy Quan, who we all know as Data from The Goonies and Short Round in Temple of Doom.
It's a performance that shows surprising range and leverages his later career work as a stunt choreographer. I get the sense he was happy enough with his path after film school, but we've clearly been missing out on good stuff from him.
In a recent NYTimes interview he talked about work drying up after child roles, something to the effect of 'I got a single audition for a Viet Cong part, and I didn't even get that.'
I distinctly recall seeing a VHS tape of 'The Goonies' retailing for £64 in a video shop in the north of England sometime around '86, which blew my tiny little mind, as that may as well have been a million pounds.
If memory serves, a video came out on video for hire 3 years after cinema release, then 2-3 years for video sale, then same again for network transmission. Or, perhaps those last two were the other way around? So long ago, goddamn.
All of my experience would be the complete opposite. Obesity is so normalized in contemporary American society that we have skewed, unhealthy concepts of what is "skinny", "normal" and "fat".
Go watch the 1985 movie The Goonies and look at the character "chunk". By 1980s American standards he was so fat that it was a defining characteristic. In 2020s America he's an average kid. The same thing can be seen anywhere. Look at any photo of the general public prior to about 1980- high school year books, concerts, festivals, political rallies, beaches, shopping malls and compare it to a similar photo today, and the change in the average body and the number of obese bodies in the contemporary photo will be night and day different.
I was born in the 70s and I don't think I ever watched a full episode, thus having no point of reference for Sloth in Goonies yelling the same phrase. And now I do.
> But if I had kids I wouldn't really let them participate. Even with the police escort, they might lose the group and be on their own in this busy city.
Don't underestimate the resourcefulness of kids - in many ways, Goonies was a documentary ;)
I would have been comfortable with my kids doing something like this at 7 years of age. I recently had to chaperone on a schoolbus for a week - the 5 and 6 yo are still "small" and easily scared, but from 7 up they are basically fearless balls of energy.
Sadly, as society, we don't give kids the level of independence they deserve, because we've been shocked and somewhat indoctrinated by 50 years of newscycle scaremongering. We expect every kid to end up like James Bulger if we let them roam - except statistically there will be one Bulger in millions, maybe billions, of kids. When I think of what I could do at the age my kids are now, I feel like I've let them down - but if I'd done anything differently, I would have had social services on my ass.
Same here, but we haven't gone as far back as the 50s. Mostly we've been enjoying family movies from the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, back when sets were elaborate and most effects were practical. Many of these older movies have really stood the test of time. Hook, The Goonies, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, Muppets movies, Ernest Scared Stoopid, Willy Wonka, etc are all family favorites.
I grew up going freely by myself most of the time, since I was 6/7 - even going to school (in ex-communist Bulgaria). Then in 1999 came to the US (Los Angeles), and start seeing the difference. But my first boss, who introduced me well to the society told me it wasn't so. He was growing up in the Valley (San Fernando) and going biking to school every day for miles. Also if you check the 80s movies - E.T., Goonies, and even now Stranger Things showing how it used to be - kids really used to roam the streets with bikes (same was in Bulgaria too - most of our kids movies were about parents going to the beach in the Summer, and kids in groups strolling around). Or my favourite kids' show - Verano Azul (spanish, and very popular in Bulgaria back in the days) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verano_azul - same thing - something changed much much later...
Being stuck at home this summer has inspired my wife and I to show our kids the classic movies that we grew up with during the 80s and 90s (Goonies, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones, etc). After going through the obvious ones, we started having difficulty remembering them all, so I created a website for just this purpose: to help parents rediscover movies from their childhood. It shows every film rated PG-13 and lower that was released at least 15 years ago. You can filter the movies by maturity level, add movies to your watch list and see where you can stream the movies. It's a simple website, without ads, that aims to help parents get through the summer with some good kid-friendly movies.
Made with boring technology (PHP and a bit of JS) because it was fastest this way. An interesting technical challenge for me (still ongoing a bit) is cleaning the data. Some screen-scraping, a few APIs to integrate and still a bunch of manual labor for myself hunting for urls to relevant review sites and normalizing things. I ended up pushing most of this manual labor through another one of my projects (https://www.t4sk.dev) which is basically mechanical turk for your personal private microtasks.
Ive already used MovieNight.tips to discover several great 80s movies that I somehow missed while growing up. I hope it helps others as well.
As a child of the 80s, I can definitely say that life in past decades was "brighter" then than it is now, although it's for reasons unrelated to graphic design. What it basically comes down to is, we used to dream and fantasize about possible futures and our contributions to it in a way that was nurtured by society. There was a general feeling that we had grown beyond the profit motive, or at least, that prosperity was increasing faster than effort.
Basic etiquette was better. Well-read people like Carl Sagan were listened to. People could have a modicum of respect in their communities as simple professionals like teachers/architects/doctors/lawyers/etc. Children were allowed to be children. We had movies like The Goonies, which illustrated the ills of society (like unrestrained real estate development) and provided a counterculture message of hope.
I'm in danger of straying into the rise of fear-based dystopia post-2000 so I'll leave it at that. I think that we can get back to the optimism of past decades, but it requires looking past the superficial and understanding that real prosperity is more about opportunity and a feeling that we're all equal and helping to build a better world together.
Jesus Christ, AirBnB didn't invent vacation rentals. There was even a movie about them 35 years ago. The non-Martha Plimpton girl from The Goonies was in it.
I may be an Apple user who is interested in such movies as the goonies at the matrix but I’m not going to open an Italian restaurant called iBuca. I just don’t feel the article has enough intellectual relevance to be on the front page of happiness
I have MUCH more access to all the worlds books, movies, television shows, music libraries and documentaries by paying for a service or using the library then I would ever have in trying to own it.
I'm not sure re-watching or re-reading anything is really limited or granted by owning...
Lets take netflix for example. If there is something on netflix that i want a friend to see and they don't have netflix, i can just bring my phone/tablet over to their house and cast the show to the TV and watch it there or they can pay a few bucks and watch the entire series in a month.
I don't have to collect anything, store anything, remember who borrowed what and quite honestly there is enough content on a few select services that i don't need them all and i'm quite content in having so much new stuff to enjoy that the need for having a favorite to watch over and over is sort of history for me.
I watched the shit out of goonies as a kid becasue it was only 1 of 5 movies our entire family could own. Had we had on-demand everything that habit would have been a non starter for me. That doesn't mean i don't love goonies to this day and that i won't ever re-watch it but i may only re-watch it when it makes a round again on netflix and magically shows up as available - and i think that kind of experience to me is much better than feeling i owe myself to watch it because i'm moving it, storing it, seeing it, shelving it and having it occupy my life in some way.
I believe it. As a film fan, this is why I really dislike Netflix—they seem a repeat offender at ripping off other artists. A few of their shows like Stranger Things (Alien, Poltergeist, Akira, Goonies) and especially Godless (Rio Bravo; Magnificent Seven; Good, Bad, and the Ugly) go beyond homage and into outright copying and stealing ideas. I understand tropes and references, but I think Netflix has shown a pattern of basically just making imitation products of other successful products. I can watch nearly anything on HBO, but can hardly find anything half worth watching on Netflix and it’s nearly all derivative of something else more interesting.
There is actually something different with these 80s movies for kids _and_ adults. Part of it was some true courage in the story-telling, for what movie studio of today would allow a character like "Sloth" from the Goonies to end up in a movie? Darkness along with the light. And sincerity in both rather than vapid "sarcasm." These movies have soul and heart.
Not saying that similar movie magic is impossible now or in the future, but in the current world of profit-driven decisions on creative direction it seems unlikely for the foreseeable future.
As someone that watched the Star Wars film for the first time relatively recent, I concur. I did not like ANY of the films at all (I watched them in the order they were released). The scripts of the first three seemed utter shit to me. It works as a family movie I guess but not one an adult should be able to enjoy. Needless to say this opinion makes me part of a despised minority but I understand why many people love the films and that many grew up with them. Just like I still love the Goonies many people still love Star Wars.
There was some magic to the 80s childhood movies -- Star Wars, ET, Last Starfighter, Goonies -- that I don't think can be bottled. Whatever stories hold that place for our kids, I don't think they will be the same movies that did it for us. There's just something about seeing Star Wars in the context of that time, and it's not the same as seeing it now.
Started exactly in June 1985. In the film Goonies, Sloth called out 'hey you guys' to a gender mixed group. Never been the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmTNWVh2gSw
You should totally change the name to Goonix (it just reminds me of one of my favourite movies - Goonies that is)
Was the movie Goonies inspired by this?
As a kid, I used to always try and create machines like this in my room. I think I was inspired by the movie "The Goonies".
Nothing I ever created worked very well, but most of the fun was in trying anyway. This story does make me want to set something up in my shed though...
I've had a number of really weird experiences with Ambien. I know, from some things I've said to other people while on it, that there are a number of things that I experienced of which I have no recollection. The things I do remember are fairly crazy in their own right. I'm not sure if this is the place to discuss this, but I'll mention a few things that I've experienced. At the very least, this should serve as a warning to anyone considering taking Ambien.
I was once convinced I was on the set of the Goonies, because my comforter happened to look like a cave. I've only seen bits and pieces of that movie, so I have no idea why I hallucinated about it. I told someone "this lady needs to sell some chickens" because I saw a woman in the middle of my room selling chickens. I saw pixies dancing in the middle of my room. I saw a little girl, about the height of the toilet, that was sucked behind it as I approached. I also called or texted a number of people and told them a bunch of things that made absolutely no sense. Things like "I don't trust you. You might read my books." Or telling them I was flying and how much I loved them. I have a subtle recollection of the latter, absolutely none of the former. I never had a "bad trip", in that I never experienced anything that made me fearful or feel bad. It was all very euphoric, but, from my understanding, this isn't true for everyone.
If you're into the whole recreational drug thing, I can't say that Ambien is a bad choice as a hallucinogen. The hangovers were mild, and only came about from large doses (~30mg). I never took it for that purpose, but I realize there are people (not necessarily here) that might be interested. As far as using it as a sleep aid, I wouldn't suggest anyone go near the stuff. It's great the first few times you take it, but the tolerance sets on rather quickly. I ended up just hallucinating until the time I would normally fall asleep. I never became dependent, but it seems that addiction isn't necessarily uncommon for those that take it for long periods of time. If you are having trouble sleeping, try melatonin supplements and light therapy. Melatonin doesn't work for everyone, but, honestly, I'd rather have a few nights where I'm unable to sleep than the hangovers and hallucinations I got from Ambien.
TL;DR: Ambien makes for a really shitty sleep-aid.