The Goonies are Good Enough for Cyndi and friends
July 24, 2018 9:21 PM   Subscribe

Cyndi Lauper’s 1985 music video Goonies 'r' Good Enough (part 1; part 2) is perhaps one of the single most bat-shit-crazy crossover moments in the history of pop culture – and I mean Japanese Nic Cage commercials crazy. [...] Lauper essentially takes on the role of The Goonies searching for buried treasurer (standard), The Fratelli’s however are replaced by an oddball selection of WWF wrestlers [...] Throw into this the actual Goonies themselves making an appearance in shameless Goonies promo t-shirts and Steven Spielbergo doing a piece to camera like a local sports anchor. It’s sheer 80s gold. Here’s a quick list of the [13] highlights that make this one of the greatest 12 minutes in entertainment and marketing history...

Bonus links:
posted by filthy light thief (34 comments total) 43 users marked this as a favorite
 
The music video has been in posts twice before:
- You let me down but Chavo never once did. (May 20, 2015)
- Internet Music Video Database (IMVDb) (February 1, 2015)

But the rest of the links are new.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:23 PM on July 24, 2018


As a representative of the collective teenagers of the 80s, I hereby declare us mortified.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:43 PM on July 24, 2018 [4 favorites]


So I’ve played hours and hours of Goonies II on the NES and i never ever realized the song was a Cindi Lauper song until I saw this video before a feature at Central Cinema. Like, a over two decades of not knowing!
posted by gc at 9:46 PM on July 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


Andre the Giant FTW!!!
posted by darkstar at 9:48 PM on July 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


I not-so-secretly love this song
posted by thivaia at 9:59 PM on July 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


I have unabashed love for this song. I listen to it driving through Astoria.
posted by nikaspark at 10:13 PM on July 24, 2018 [8 favorites]


I cannot hear this song without a mental overdub of “My bike! I want my bike! I WANT MY BIKE!”
posted by corey flood at 10:22 PM on July 24, 2018 [9 favorites]


OUCH! WHAT DO YOU DO?
posted by panama joe at 10:28 PM on July 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


Oh, goodness. Hundreds if not thousand of hours over at my friend Vaughan's house after school, doing homework and playing pirated C=64 games and MTV was always on. Always. And when this video was released they'd play the long version maybe a few times a day and the short version many times a day.

I remember those times, with great detail.
posted by hippybear at 10:29 PM on July 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


Bat shit crazy pretty much sums it up.
posted by gryphonlover at 10:33 PM on July 24, 2018 [1 favorite]


I have unabashed love for this song. I listen to it driving through Astoria.

Me, too! Actually, Mrs. gurple and I put it on every time we're about to enter Astoria, and sometimes we jump the gun, so we have to start it over so that it's still playing when we drive by the docks, and the museum and jail, and the bowling alley, and and and.

Astoria is such a great town. The fact that it's drenched in Gooniestalgia is totally and maybe embarrassingly unrelated to the ways in which Astoria is a great town. But there it is.
posted by gurple at 10:35 PM on July 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


She sounds fantastic just singing on set there in the behind the scenes clip. Don't seem to be that many Cyndi Lauper isolated vocal tracks out there though.. Despite the bad tracking, this was really nice!
posted by Chuckles at 10:38 PM on July 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


Cyndi is one of the best vocalists you will ever hear. Seeing her live (which I've done three times across many years) is one of those things where you walk in expecting one thing and another thing entirely happens, especially if you've not see her before. But even after that, she will still surprise you. She inhabits the vocal and lyric. Cyndi, Karen Carpenter, Barry Manilow, Frank Sinatra, Kate Bush... All of these somehow rhyme in my mind.
posted by hippybear at 10:44 PM on July 24, 2018 [9 favorites]


No Taffy Butt?
posted by Sys Rq at 10:44 PM on July 24, 2018 [3 favorites]


you walk in expecting one thing and another thing entirely happens

Ballad of Cleo and Joe, holy crap!

Any recommendations for really well mastered Cyndi Lauper recordings? As awesome as the above is from the performance side, it sounds like crap..
posted by Chuckles at 11:00 PM on July 24, 2018 [2 favorites]


Well holy shit, Cyndi Lauper: At Last.

Okay, I will let you all get back to talking about Goonies now, I know that's what MetaFilter really wants.
posted by Chuckles at 12:01 AM on July 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


The Goonies is one of those 80s movies that everyone has seen and I somehow missed at the time and never caught up with. I'm guessing that it's not going to hold up very well in 2018 though.
posted by octothorpe at 3:59 AM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


octothorpe: it’s still a charming coming-of-age movie with pacing that still feels contemporary in 2018.
posted by xxyyxxzz at 4:53 AM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


I saw The Goonies in the theatre, and for some reason I have a more vivid memory of coming home and giving my mom a recap ("And then THIS happened and then THIS happened...") than of the movie itself. I also remember thinking this video was strange, even at the time, even surrounded as it was by all the other weird '80s stuff.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:32 AM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


The Goonies was a life-changing movie for me as a somewhat sheltered 6-year-old (swearing kids! Children in peril! Skeletons and monsters!), but I don't think it holds up.

I introduced it to my husband a few years ago. I was so excited for him to see the movie that meant so much to me...and we couldn't even get through it. It's two hours of nonsensically screaming children. I felt so bad, both for me (realizing my childhood favorite movie was a chaotic mess) and for my poor husband, who really was was making a valiant effort to enjoy it for my benefit.

I still love it in its time and place in my life, but it would take at least two Fratellis with blenders to get me to watch it again.
posted by Elly Vortex at 6:33 AM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


I loved the Goonies and this song and, weirdly, was just wondering yesterday how the movie holds up. The song holds up great. I love Cyndi Lauper.
posted by Mavri at 6:44 AM on July 25, 2018


Sit down, Waldo.
posted by stevil at 7:01 AM on July 25, 2018


Aside from being wildly implausible with respect to the structural integrity of booby traps stored in a seaside cave for 350 years, I think the movie holds together quite well. The novelization is also very good.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 7:03 AM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


Historians will regard this song as the final authority regarding the adequacy of the Goonies.
posted by dr_dank at 7:15 AM on July 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


I feel like I mentioned this awhile back but DID YOU KNOW Cyndi Lauper is the first woman to win a Tony solo for Best Original Score? (For Kinky Boots, which I haven't seen)

Cyndi Lauper is great and still kicking ass, basically
posted by dismas at 7:59 AM on July 25, 2018 [6 favorites]


i don't follow musical theater, i just got worried about cyndi lauper last christmas because I was re-watching Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion and I was happy to see she was still at it
posted by dismas at 8:06 AM on July 25, 2018


The Goonies is totally still relevant! We watched it with my 6 year old recently and he enjoyed it (as did we).

It explains a lot about why Thanos turned out the way he did...
posted by trif at 8:20 AM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


This has always been one of my favorite songs for reasons I can't articulate.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 9:13 AM on July 25, 2018 [3 favorites]


When The Goonies came out on a special edition DVD last decade, someone brought it in to work (industry workplace) and examined it in depth. We spent HOURS on these two music videos. They are fascinating cultural artifacts.

So, did that song really require two music videos with wall-to-wall wrestlers and actor cameos? I suspect that the major motion picture marketing tie-in people gave the record company a relative shit-ton of money and threw WWF a relative shit-ton too, and WWF was used to making weekly shows for peanuts so they made a BIG show with that Hollywood movie but had no experience making an actual short film (necessitating two videos for some reason because why waste the footage?), and of course Spielberg made a cameo with that hairdo and that outfit because come on, everyone was doing coke back then, it was no big deal...

More seriously, 1985-era WWF craved the kind of pop culture legitimacy Spielberg had achieved seemingly effortlessly in the decade prior, but had no idea how to achieve it themselves in spite of their immense popularity. So they tried to link themselves to Spielberg in the minds of viewers largely by repeating his name in some sort of totemic cargo-cult Trumpian word-salad filmmaking. I feel like The Goonies succeeded because of its goofy in-joke youth subculture honest spectacle, which was WWF's stock-in-trade that they didn't value because mainstream culture didn't value it.
posted by infinitewindow at 12:43 PM on July 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


As I recall, there was a several week delay between the first video and the second.
So, Part 1 - with the cliffhanger - got lots of airplay, and MTV made a huge event out of Part 2's debut.
posted by cheshyre at 2:09 PM on July 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


I have just one question: Benihana?
posted by box at 2:33 PM on July 25, 2018


On the video game--
The article mentions the two Famicom games (one of which made it to NES), but they made more than just those. There's an MSX version that's very different, there's home computer versions with their own differences, and there's even another Famicom game, Konami Wai-Wai World, where Mikey is a character, as is "Goon Docks" as a location, but you can also take him to Goemon's crazy version of medieval Japan, Contra's alien invasion, or even Castlevania....
posted by JHarris at 3:04 PM on July 25, 2018 [2 favorites]


I saw it last year as a free movie in the park. It didn't hold up for me. 1st act is solid, 2nd teeters and the last act is a hot mess.

And of course the premises that a bunch of white, well-off families in Astoria are losing their seaside homes so someone even more well-off developers can build a golf-course doesn't make any sense. Some of those houses might be rentals but not the entire neighborhood.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 3:49 PM on July 25, 2018


I was always side-eyeing the golf course bit....Mikey's house is on a very steep incline, what golf course was going up there?
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 9:30 PM on July 25, 2018 [1 favorite]


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