Goonie

ANDY! YOU GOONIE!! Oh the memories.  The constant struggle for keeping your friends and family, yet wanting something better for everyone as well.  The Goonies may be about Mikey and his young group of goon dock friends trying to stay in the place they reside, but it has many similarities to Saturday Night Fever.  Tony and his group are much like the goonies, seeking something.  Mikey’s neighborhood, the goon dock area, is facing the harsh reality of new construction and demolition of the place they have called home.  Not everyone who lives in the area is as worried about it, but Mikey and his friends are seeking something better, saving the goon docks.  Tony depends so much on his friends, he wouldn’t even have a car to get around town if it were not for his friend Bobby.  His friends give him his self-confidence at first, telling him how well he can do on the dance floor.  Mikey finds a treasure map and decides this is a great attempt to get enough money to save their homes; rather than his friends telling him that it is a dumb and farfetched idea, they fully support him and group together to go find the treasure of One-Eyed Willie.  Just as Tony and his gang are one of the lowest social groups, so are Mikey and his friends, I mean they are even called the goonies.  Tony gets in to a scuffle with another social class and Mikey’s brother gets into it with Troy, whose father is planning the destruction of the goon docks.  In the end the movies are not the same, but all throughout they are similar in the struggle as a young person in life with the support of his friends.

One other movie comes to mind, and it is definitely escapism, The Neverending Story.  It relates to Saturday Night Fever in a completely different way than The Goonies, it relates based on the cool theme.  The Neverending Story is about a boy, Bastian, escaping the harsh realities of his life through a book that starts to involve himself.  He is being bullied by a group of boys his own age on the way to school and hides in a bookstore.  Rather than going to class and taking his test he goes up to the attic and becomes enthralled in the new book, which he was warned could be dangerous.  In the book he becomes a vital character, just as Tony became a vital dancer to the disco floor.  Bastian enjoys the book for its adventure, but even more for its inclusion of him.  Eventually his father finds out and he must stop, though he chooses to take one more action to save the characters in his self-involved book. Though The Neverending Story is much more fantasy than Saturday Night Fever, it still maintains the ideas of cool escapism.