Roots and Beginnings: The Goonies (dir. Richard Donner)

I was bullied in the third and fourth grade. Not horribly, I don’t suppose – I got punched but was never really beaten up, I got mocked but don’t recall it having an effect on my ability to live my little life beyond being really sad and upset about being mocked. People had it worse, is what I’m saying. For some reason, when talking about bullying, it always seems important to establish that basic level of self-awareness, that people had it worse. But that knowledge is not really available to you at the time. At the time, you think to yourself “I’m not doing anything to upset anyone, I try to be nice and obey the rules and do a good job at school, my mommy loves me…Why is this happening?” And you dream of escape. My number-one such dream, the dream that was so pointedly and poignantly and excruciatingly dorky and sweet and pathetic that I can’t help but laugh at its perfection even as I recount it to you, is that the Goonies would show up at the playing field of the Stratford Avenue Elementary School in Garden City, New York in matching jackets that read “THE GOONIES” (“THE” on one jacket, one letter per jacket for the rest), that they’d take me in as one of their own, and that I would be triumphantly held aloft on the shoulders of Sloth as we sauntered away to the disbelief of my tormenters, with my own jacket containing the little skull dot above Sloth’s jacket’s letter “I.”

Wow, that sure was cathartic, writing that out! And I’m telling you, man, this was so real to me. I wanted this so badly. What a perfect movie, for someone like me: a bunch of misfit kids no one really liked get sucked into a vortex of high adventure literally underneath the eyes and ears of their sleepy suburb, eventually emerging victorious – older, wiser, richer, with the gratitude of their parents, the acknowledgement by everyone that they’re pretty special after all, and in one key case, sexually awakened by kissing Kerri Green in a cheerleader outfit, a consummation devoutly to be wished even when you’re an entirely presexual grade-school kid. The “I wish I lived there” experiences that a lot of nerd culture reports regarding escapist fare like superhero comics or D&D? I wasn’t into those things, and I didn’t even really get that from the nerd-canon stuff I was into, like Star Wars or Tolkien. No, I got it from The Goonies. I got it bad.