My Dad Tells Me the Truth

I hadn’t seen The Goonies in something like a decade. We put it on at home a few weeks ago because I had to rewatch it for my podcast The Secrets of Movies, and I figured the kids would get a kick out of it.

What I remembered going in were the truffle shuffle, the bone organ, and “Hey you guys.”

What I had completely blocked out was how much these children swear. 1985 was a different word. My co-host Rob had the same experience watching it with his own kids, and Patrick grew up on the syndicated TV cut where every curse got dubbed to “shoot,” so the original was news to him.

But the line that stopped me is one you could easily miss, and it comes early, up in the attic.

Mikey has dragged everybody up to the Walsh attic and found the map. He tells them the story of One-Eyed Willie, including the Spanish galleon, the pirates, and the treasure sitting under their own town. It’s an absurd story and the other kids say so.

But Mikey retorts vehemently, “My dad tells me the truth.”

There’s a nice bit of production trivia buried in that scene. Richard Donner sat Sean Astin down right before they shot it, told him the whole One-Eyed Willie legend, then had him tell it back from memory, because he wanted it to sound like a kid retelling something he loved rather than an actor reciting a monologue. You can hear it as the speech stumbles in the right places.

Here’s what’s strange. Mikey’s father has almost no screen time.

He waves at the boys from the historical society’s yard as they ride past on their bikes and he turns up at the end and that’s about it. He’s the guy with the pile of historical junk in the attic, an idealist and a romantic, and you get the sense the rest of Astoria thinks of him as a little flighty. Nice guy. Head in the clouds. Never quite got it together.

Yet his son takes his word as fact anyway.

He trusts the man, so he trusts what the man handed him, and then he acts on it hard enough to climb down a well.

I’ve been chewing on that for weeks now, because it’s a pretty exact picture of what faith looks like from the inside. Mikey’s trust runs through a person. He trusts the man, so he trusts what the man handed him, and then he acts on it hard enough to climb down a well. The evidence for One-Eyed Willie is terrible and he goes anyway.

The word for that is childlike, and we’ve mostly turned that into an insult. Watch a kid do it and it plays as something else entirely. Mikey is the only one in the room willing to bet on a story his dad told him, and he turns out to be the only one who’s right.

The payoff comes later, in the scene everybody remembers.

They’ve hit the wishing well where there’s a rope and a bucket, and up at the top of it is Troy, and home, and the end of the whole adventure. Every kid down there is ready to quit. Mikey isn’t, and he gives the speech.

“Down here it’s our time.”

Rob called that the heart of the movie and I’d go further. It’s the emotional and spiritual center of the thing, and it only works because of the attic scene. Mikey’s certainty was borrowed from his father, and this is the moment he spends it.

Patrick made a point during the recording that I keep coming back to. Up top, the parents are selling their houses to give their kids a better life. That’s a real sacrifice and it’s happening in good faith. But it’s their time, up there, in the world of foreclosure papers and country club developers who win. Down in the tunnels, the kids get one day that belongs to them, and Mikey’s whole argument is that they should spend it being kids instead of being reasonable.

Which makes this a more Catholic movie than anybody making it probably intended. There’s a version of growing up that’s just a slow surrender of wonder, one concession at a time, and The Goonies plants its flag against it. Acting your age sometimes means acting your age. A 10-year-old should be on a pirate treasure hunt. That’s the correct use of a 10-year-old.

I first ran into this movie around 1985 when it came out. I don’t actually remember sitting in the theater, I just remember always having known it, which is its own kind of evidence. I would have been Brand’s age at the time, not Mikey’s, and that distinction felt enormous to me then.

Now I’m watching it as the dad. And the dad in this movie has one job, which he does entirely off screen: he told his kid a true story and his kid believed him.

I don’t know how to write that without it sounding like a greeting card, so I’ll just say it plainly. My kids take my word for things, or at least the younger ones do. The older two young adults have begun having their own minds and opinions, but at least on the important stuff, they all still trust me. Maybe it won’t be forever, and not about everything, but right now they do, and The Goonies is quietly making an argument about what that’s for. You hand them something worth believing, and then one day you’re not in the room and they climb down the well on the strength of it.

Mr. Walsh never sees the tunnels. He never meets Sloth or stands on the Inferno. He gets the jewels in the marble bag at the end and a house he doesn’t have to leave, and he probably never fully understands how any of it happened.

Sounds about right for fatherhood.

You hand them something worth believing, and then one day you’re not in the room and they climb down the well on the strength of it.

Warner Bros. confirmed a Goonies sequel in February 2025 with much of the original team coming back. I want it to be good and I have my doubts.

The thing this movie does is hard. It keeps a world that’s dialed slightly past reality, where the danger never actually lands and a boy’s trust in his father is treated as the most sensible position in the room. If you miss that tone and you’ve got a nostalgia delivery vehicle. I’d rather they left it alone than got it half right.

But that’s a worry for later. The original still draws thousands of people to Astoria every summer, and it earned that.

I got into all of this with Rob Leonardi and Patrick Mason on this week’s Secrets of Movies: the swearing, the Sloth makeup, how much Stranger Things and Skeleton Crew owe this film, and whether the sequel has a prayer. It’s out this week. Come argue with me about the sequel.

Hey, you guys.