Fourth Draft script deconstruction - The Bone Organ and the Blasted Octopus

Play Them Bones

The Goonies finds a giant waterfall, with an old boat mast as a makeshift bridge across the gap. The Fratellis catch up to them and they have no choice but to cross over the precarious, slippery log.

But wait! First Mikey has to be a little shit!

I’ll give this credit in that at least Mikey doesn’t make some weird comment about Andy. Still weird though!

Not much else is different up to the extravagant Bone Organ. The order in which the Goonies nearly fall is different, but that’s not really that important to, oh who am I kidding, here’s a comparison you guys probably didn’t care about but I want to document this!

Script	Movie
Mikey	Mouth
Mouth	Brand
EVERYONE	Data

The EVERYONE is a little vague, but there’s multiple wrong notes in the script, at which all the Goonies have to scramble around to avoid standing above where the floor is going to fall. This may have been changed from a technical standpoint, since the room the organ is kept in is, honestly, pretty small, and having like five kids run around the place would have been cramped and awful to film.

When the whole place falls apart, everyone escapes out the water slide. But in the script, Mikey was meant to, erm, somehow “step on yet another note”?, which makes the whole place fall apart. Again, more focus on Mikey rather than the Goonies as a cohesive group. So, instead of the tense moment of Andy snagging the map back from the organ while the Fratellis take aim, the tense moment consists of Brand helping save his brother from falling down the giant hole he’s made.

We skipped over a few things about this sequence, so let’s go back a little.

This bit with Data nearly falling off the mast and into the water may have evolved into a bit that was filmed and cut from the final product, involving Mikey and Mouth coming to help Data get away after he uses his Slick Shoes. Like the Fratelli brothers, they also slip on the water and nearly fall off.

This was filmed!

Something missing from the script that’s in the movie is Data’s run-in with the Fratelli brothers, knocking them back down the slippery rocks with the hidden boxing glove in his jacket. Honestly, the reason I wanted to spent a little time talking about this is because, for the longest time, even as a child, I was confused as to why this bit was the only part of the movie that had stock cartoon noises and sped-up footage. I could never piece it together, on any of my rewatches, until reading this script.

As previously set up, the script is far more cartoonish and comical than the final version of The Goonies. Of course, this begs the question as to why the editor put in this part, but here’s a bit that is in the script:

This happens while the Fratellis are moving through the room with the previous puzzle trap. That was cut from the final product, but Donner must have liked the slapstick of it, and decided to keep it in as a moment for Data’s inventions to shine.

The cartooniness of it does match up with the Fourth Draft’s take on the story, and so does this bit with the skeleton punching Jake… but I suppose I still can’t explain the origins of the sound effects. It horrifies me to wonder if the whole movie was intended to have them all throughout. Yeesh.

Eight Arms To Hold You

I’m sad to say that the water slide scene, something that pretty much everyone looks at and says “man that must have been fun to ride down”, is a paragraph long in the Fourth Draft script. I guess there’s not much you can say about “and then the Goonies go down an unrealistic water slide”.

Before we get to the Main Event of this part, let’s get the side scenes with Sloth and Chunk out of the way. You know how in the movie they randomly show up on the ship decked out in pirate stuff?

“No… Captain Chunk!”

Well, turns out that Chunk and Sloth were meant to come across the “touch the skeleton’s bone boner” room and loot the area! This of course means that room must have existed in the movie version, which means that was filmed and I don’t even wanna think about that. (Though, there’s absolutely no sign of such thing in the movie, so either they made some changes along the way or they found a different way to get pirate stuff or okay maybe I’m considering this too much…)

Either way, mystery solved. Kind of.

Because of their run-in with leeches earlier, Brand is concerned about leeches in the lagoon they fell into off the slide. Makes sense. So, Data pulls out a raft and attempts to inflate it, only for it to explode. This is… only half-pointless to include, because it does casually set up for how fragile the cavern is, which is a nice little touch.

And here we come to the most well-known piece of trivia about The Goonies: the octopus scene. So many other pop culture sites and top-five list YouTube videos document this, so I’m not much going to explain the scene. In short, from Sean Astin’s mouth: “the octopus sucked”.

A cute line here is from Stef, who references a popular song by Cyndi Lauper, who contributed two songs to the soundtrack (“The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough” and the often ignored “What A Thrill”).

What’s not so cute is the specifics of the octopus groping at Stef and Andy. Eugh. I get this is a script and it needs to detail what’s happening on screen but just… come on, have some decency. These are kids!

Frankly the only other interesting thing to note is the song choice: “Burning Down The House” by Talking Heads. Something I’ve been glossing over is how the Fourth Draft script calls for specific songs, ones that were not used in the final cut. For documentation’s sake, here is a list of songs used in the script alongside the songs that were actually used. It’s a short list but I wanted to curate this somewhere!

Scene	Script	Movie
Andy's cheerleading practice	Tina Turner - "Better Be Good To Me"	The Bangles - "I Got Nothing"
Leaving the Walsh residence	Bruce Springsteen - "Cover Me"	Cyndi Lauper - "The Goonies 'R' Good Enough"
Octopus scene	Talking Heads - "Burning Down The House"	Goon Squad - "Eight Arms To Hold You"

Either way, Data shoves his little Walkman into the octopus’ mouth and it proceeds to “comic[ally] dance” dance away. With the final version, the octopus just sort of… leaves. I chalk it up to the puppet not being able to articulate breakdancing away.

This scene is… yeah. It plain sucks. The practical effects are cool but, man are they hokey. I love me a good dated effect, but the octopus is really embarrassing to look at. There’s a reason it was removed from the theatrical cut. In case you haven’t seen this deleted scene, here’s a video of it: