Growing Up on Adventure: Why The Goonies Still Matters

 

When you’re young, adventure doesn’t need to be grand. It can start with a dusty map, a broken gate, or a secret whispered in a treehouse. The Goonies (1985) understood that better than almost any film of its time. Directed by Richard Donner and written by Chris Columbus from a Steven Spielberg story, it offered a vision of childhood that was scrappy, loud, and full of heart—a treasure hunt that doubled as a lesson in loyalty and courage.

The film opens in Astoria, Oregon, a sleepy coastal town where a group of kids—Mikey, Mouth, Chunk, and Data—set out to save their neighborhood from demolition. What begins as an attempt to find “One-Eyed Willy’s” lost pirate treasure turns into something larger: a test of friendship, bravery, and imagination itself.

Watching it now, the film’s magic still holds. It’s chaotic, yes, but that chaos feels alive. The kids talk over each other, stumble, laugh too loud, panic, dream. Unlike many family films, The Goonies never sanitizes childhood. It captures how messy and thrilling it really is—the mixture of fear and excitement when you do something you probably shouldn’t but have to see through.

Adventure as Bond

At its core, The Goonies is about collective courage. The children don’t win because one of them is exceptional; they win because they refuse to give up on each other. Mikey’s faith in the journey, Chunk’s comic relief, Data’s wild inventions—all of it adds up to a story about how friendship gives ordinary kids heroic strength.

That’s what sets it apart from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), another Spielberg world of suburban adventure. E.T. is about connection too, but in a more intimate key—a single boy, Elliott, finding a friend who helps him navigate loneliness and loss. The Goonies spreads that feeling outward. Instead of one child and one alien, it’s a whole group facing adulthood’s first shadows together.

Where E.T. looks upward—to the stars and the ache of saying goodbye—The Goonies looks downward, into tunnels and caves, toward history and buried treasure. E.T. ends with separation, The Goonies with unity. Both films hinge on faith: Elliott believes in E.T.’s magic; Mikey believes in Willy’s legend. But E.T. is quiet wonder, and The Goonies is noisy hope.

Growing Up Without Letting Go

There’s another film from that era that sits neatly beside The Goonies: Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me (1986). It’s also about a group of boys on a journey, also full of danger, also shaped by the edge between childhood and adolescence. But tonally, Stand by Me is its opposite.

Where The Goonies is a fantasy that lets kids stay kids longer, Stand by Me is a reckoning with growing up. The boys’ trek to find a dead body isn’t about adventure—it’s about mortality, loss, and the way friendship changes when innocence fades. You feel the weight of memory in every frame, especially through the film’s narration: an adult voice remembering a time that can’t be recovered.

In The Goonies, the treasure hunt works. They find gold, the villains are thwarted, and the community is saved. In Stand by Me, there’s no gold, just a body and the realization that life is fragile. One celebrates discovery; the other confronts consequence.

Yet both films understand something essential about youth: the need to go somewhere. The movement itself—the quest, the tracks, the tunnels—is how kids in these stories start to define themselves. Adventure becomes identity.

The Myth of Place

Each of these films is built around a map of sorts. The Goonies has its pirate chart. E.T. maps an ordinary suburb as a site of miracles. Stand by Me follows train tracks across small-town Oregon into the wilderness. The physical journeys mirror emotional ones—leaving home, finding courage, accepting loss.

For Mikey and his friends, the tunnels under Astoria are a metaphor for the growing-up process itself: dark, winding, filled with traps, but leading—if you persist—to something luminous. In E.T., the map is domestic, confined to Elliott’s home and neighborhood, but its emotional range is cosmic. In Stand by Me, the path is linear but irreversible: the boys can’t walk back into innocence once they’ve seen what they came to find.

Memory and Tone

Part of why The Goonies endures is tone. It’s earnest but never naive. Its danger feels real—spikes, skeletons, criminals—but the film never loses faith in the kids’ ability to handle it. It trusts them, and by extension, it trusts the audience’s sense of adventure.

E.T., by contrast, holds a quiet melancholy under its wonder. Spielberg gives us longing—the kind of ache that comes with loving something you can’t keep. Stand by Me carries nostalgia more directly, filtered through memory and loss. Watching all three feels like tracking childhood’s emotional evolution:

• The Goonies: belief in adventure.
• E.T.: belief in connection.
• Stand by Me: belief in memory.

They’re stages of innocence, wonder, and reflection. You can almost imagine the same child growing through all three: first searching for treasure, then finding a friend from the stars, then looking back years later at what’s been lost.

Why It Still Resonates

What’s striking, rewatching The Goonies as an adult, is how much heart it carries under the noise. Beneath the jokes and booby traps lies a fear that every child recognizes: the fear of losing home, of being forgotten, of growing up before you’re ready. That’s the emotional spine connecting it to E.T. and Stand by Me.

All three are about the moment childhood starts to slip away. The Goonies masks it with adventure; E.T. with wonder; Stand by Me with grief. But the ache is the same. The treasure map, the glowing finger, the tracks through the woods—they’re all metaphors for crossing from one world to another.

The Invitation to Remember

The Goonies’ final shot, with the kids reunited and the pirate ship sailing off into the mist, is pure Spielbergian release—magic restored, innocence temporarily saved. Stand by Me ends on a keyboard click and the quiet of adulthood. E.T. ends with a spaceship leaving, and a promise: “I’ll be right here.”

Put together, they form a kind of cinematic childhood trilogy, even though they were made by different directors. One about friendship’s beginning, one about its loss, and one about holding on to belief in between.

We return to these films not for plot or nostalgia alone, but because they remind us what it felt like to be brave before we knew what bravery cost. They give us a way to revisit that child who still believes in hidden tunnels and glowing skies—and to remember that growing up doesn’t mean the adventure has to end.