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Popular Culture Review
Don’t you realize? The next time you see the sky, it’ll be
another town. The next time you take a test, it’ll be in some
other school. Our parents, they want the best stuff for us. But
right now, they got to do what’s right for them. Because it’s
their time. Their time! Up there! Down here, it’s our time. It’s
our time down here.
Andy’s former beau, the rich banker’s son Troy Perkins, is above ground
taunting, “Andy, you Goonie,” and the outsiders realize that only in the
underworld can they succeed. They must, for their parents, too, have failed
them, symptomatic of a society in trouble, and it is a dead pirate, not a father,
who leads and inspires them. The villains of the story, both the Fratelli family
and the bankers, prove to be no match for the determined kids, who find the
Willie’s skeleton and the treasure, even though they lose it. Imperfect but
empowered, the Goonies escape the cave and identify the Fratellis for police,
and Mikey discovers that he has pilfered enough riches from the pirate ship to
save their families’ homes from foreclosure. “Dad, Dad, it’s my marble bag,” he
says. “The Fratellis forgot to check it. I emptied out all of my marbles and put
the jewels in. We don’t have to leave the Goon Docks!” The children fix what
their parents could not, saving their town and their way of life. Mikey may have
not have gotten all the riches, but he got enough. In this climactic scene, Mikey
and Brandon’s father, Irving Walsh, tear up the foreclosure documents delivered
by banker Elgin Perkins to his house that day and says, “There’ll be no more
signing today or ever again.” Thanks to his children who took matters into their
own hands, he is vindicated.
The narrative reflects not only the increased need for responsibility and
problem-solving among Gen X children in single-parent, divorced, and twocareer families but also the emphasis on riches in the 1980s, known as the
“decade of greed” (Moffitt and Campbell 1). According to Grace Palladino,
“teenagers who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s were already well aware
that they would have to make money (and plenty of it) to live almost as well as
their parents did” (Palladino xix). In The Goonies, the lost kids secure their bag
of jewels and are heralded as heroes. However, they realize that their greatest
treasures—their true pirates’ bounty—are family, home, friends, and
community. America’s core values in the conservative Reagan era are affirmed.
A final way in which The Goonies speaks to its original Gen X audience
regards popular culture, which, according to television critic Rob Owen,“is Gen
X’s specialty” (Owen xii). For 1980s youth, MTV, which debuted on August 1,
1981, was a defining event. “I thought MTV was just about the coolest thing Td
ever seen in my life,” notes Jennifer Hale. “[It] turned everything up a notch”
(qtd. in Owen 5). Cindy Lauper, whose song “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” was
an MTV hit, did the popular theme song for Goonies, adding to the film’s draw.
A good song, according to a recent study conducted by Robert Zatorre and
Valorie Salimpoor of McGill University in Montreal, increases dopamine in the
brain, giving pleasure (Ritter 2). Thus, the feel-good quality of this child-as