Headscratchers / The Goonies

• The Goonies find a coin in the wishing well with the portrait of Kennedy on it, making it a Kennedy Half-Dollar. Who throws half-dollar coins into wishing wells?
  • Rich snobs with money to burn. AKA, the usual fare of the local Country Club.
  • Someone was so desperate for a wish to come true that they used more money. In other words, maybe it was Mouth's.
• Why does One-Eyed Willie have an eye patch? Based on the fact that there's bone underneath, he didn't lose the eye, he was born without it.
  • Because he wanted people to look at him and instantly realize that he's a force to be reckoned with. There's no better way to do that than to have an Eyepatch of Power.
  • In the Novelization, Mikey conjectures that Willy wore the eyepatch in order to disguise a birth defect as a battle scar.
  • What kind of question is that? I think almost anyone would prefer wearing an eyepatch to walking around visibly missing an eye; even if it wasn't due to injury, it would still be off-putting to look at.
  • Better to be thought just another naval-battle survivor than a fairground freak. Society wasn't at all kind to the congenitally-disabled back in Willie's day.
• Spielberg has openly admitted that the most iconic scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark was taken from Carl Barks' Uncle Scrooge comics — has he or anyone else involved ever admitted the same about the entire premise/plot of this film?
  • So every treasure hunt adventure is a ripoff of Uncle Scrooge? Robert Louis Stevenson, you time-traveling con artist!
• Considering that she apparently speaks no English, how did Rosalita understand enough of what was going on to tell them to stop signing the papers? She doesn't even have any particular reason to care about those people losing their houses, does she?
  • Two possibilities: despite not caring particularly for Mikey and his family, she had still been hired to work for them and so was showing loyalty to the ones paying her; or far more likely, a lack of knowledge of English wouldn't stop her from understanding how sleazy and smarmy Perkins was, or that he was ruining things for all the kids' innocent families (who had not done anything to her, after all). Not to mention her background would make her far more likely to sympathize with several close-knit, lower-middle class families than a bunch of snobbish rich people who would treat her as bad as or worse than the Goonies and their families.
  • Re: the papers, it's apparently common knowledge what's happening to the Goondocks. Mikey's mother says "I want the house to be clean when they tear it down" so Rosalita obviously knows what's going on. As to why she cares, maybe she's just a decent human being?
  • Just because Rosalita isn't fluent enough in English to discuss her employers' financial troubles doesn't mean she hasn't been discussing the neighborhood's peril with bilingual members of her own family, who can keep her abreast of the situation.
• What's up with the name Sloth?
  • His real name is actually Lotney (mentioned by Jake and Francis during their confrontation on the Inferno), so "Sloth" is presumably his best attempt to pronounce it.
    • Well, the Fratellis have been to the zoo. (At the very least to steal chains.) Maybe they saw a sloth and thought "Wow, that thing looks like Lotney's face."
    • I think Chunks gave him that nickname because all the goonies have nicknames.
    • Nope, he introduces himself to Chunk as Sloth from the start.
• The Fratellis leave the restaurant with a plastic garbage bag that probably does not contain garbage, allowing the Goonies to go back inside and investigate the place. The Fratellis return later with pizza, forcing the Goonies to hide in the basement... after they discover a(nother) dead body in the downstairs freezer. Is the Fratelli policy to take one body out at a time and dispose of it, and get pizza after a trip when they're still high-alert fugitives?
  • First of all, The Fratellis aren't exactly bright. Second, they thought they were safe hiding out in an abandoned restaurant, so they figured they had all the time in the world to clean up. In the novelization, the reason given is that there was no room for the tall detective's corpse to fit (in an SUV, mind you) so they had to come back. As for the pizza, I think that's a gag — the screenplay doesn't let you forget the Fratellis are Italians for even a moment.
• How did a pirate ship from centuries ago even make it all the way to the west coast of the United States in the first place? While certainly possible to have navigated around the lower tip of South America, it seems... unlikely. Even somewhere on the east coast may have been pushing it(yes I am aware that Christopher Columbus & his crew made the journey many years before, but special expeditions like that required planning and extra stock of materials to make the journey of several months. Floating there accidentally with a limited stock of resources- regardless of a trip around South America to the northern part of the US, or even the east coast- would be contrived).
  • Was it ever stated that Willie had been a Caribbean pirate? Piracy took place on the other side of the New World too, it just wasn't as famous for it.
  • I took it as Willie just being that obsessed with keeping his treasure hoard safe. So much that he willingly went around the tip of South America.
• Jake Fratelli has a beautiful opera singing voice. This man could literally be making millions in a legitimate career as an opera singer but instead he chooses to eek his way through life as a petty thief. Interesting choice!
  • Do you have any idea how hard it is to make it as a singer, or performer of any kind, even for those with talent? I mean, jeez, this movie is about a bunch of kids taking on a group of professional criminals on a treasure hunt left by 17th-century pirates, and you’re complaining about one of the few realistic components of the film.
  • Let's not kid ourselves. Character actor Robert Davi is no Luciano Pavarotti.
• How did the city commission of Astoria somehow miss the caves and trail when building the city water and utility infrastructure? With all of the digging required for utilities and buildings, you would expect some of the trails and traps to be revealed.
  • Possibly the city's public works crews did notice the cave network: they just didn't consider it worth taking time off their paid labor or risking a nasty spelunking accident to poke around underground. It could well be that Chester Copperpot's venture into the tunnels was inspired by something one of the pipe-installers or well-diggers reported about what was down there.