Fourth Draft script deconstruction - The Gorillas (and misc.)

The Gorillas In The Room

Thankfully left out of the final movie, there are two characters who are an odd presence in The Goonies. Calling them “characters” is honestly a pretty big stretch. There’s no other way to really go about this so I’ll just say it: there were gorillas in the Fourth Draft script.

It’s hard to believe this, especially off of just written word by a fan online, but, lo and behold…

Readers, I say this will all conviction, with every ounce of my sanity spiraling down into a slurry of nonexistence, that there are god damn gorillas in the Fourth Draft script of the 1985 classic The Goonies.

Worse: some of the scenes involving them may have been filmed at some point, as pieces of concept art and production stills show that, yes, that is indeed two gorillas driving Troy Perkin’s badass red Ford Mustang GT.

I’m going to say this one more time so you understand the adrenaline and fear rush I had upon reading this for the first time: there are fucking gorillas in the Fourth Draft script of The Goonies, and this is a reality we must all live with.

I yearn for death.

“Bonzo The Great and His Mate”, Bertha, are two gorillas who live at the Cauldron Point Zoo, because apparently Cauldron Point or Astoria have the population count to conceivably have a zoo. They are owned by Simon and Simone Simian, names that fill my throat with bile, and they have been trained to drive a comically tiny red car to amuse the masses.

Christopher Columbus, what the fuck.

There’s really no way I am going to be able to really fully explain this without attempting to strangle myself here. There’s just… gorillas here for some reason. Um, they’re in the Fratelli chase sequence? And they take a golf cart from the Perkins’? Then they show up later and fall into the caverns the Goonies are in? They scare off the Fratellis too, and then Sloth tries to fight them, um… they steal Troy’s car and crash it in the last scene of the movie?

They’re just kind of… here for the joke. And the whole idea of joke characters isn’t new, lots of movies have one-beat characters that are here for a laugh of the absurdity of the whole thing but, this is… it’s too much, too much for my little brain to really process.

It’s kind of a rabbit hole effect. The first thing anyone really learns about the movie is the octopus scene, because it’s not a very hidden fact that there was, indeed, an octopus scene. But the gorillas thing is just… buried in there, honestly. They’re not in any promotional materials - the games, the books… none of them include the gorillas. The 25th Anniversary re-release included deleted scene storyboard cards, with one being specifically about the gorillas stealing Troy’s Mustang from the gas station. Running DVD commentary for the film mentions the gorillas… one time and never again. It’s not much discussed, just a quick fly-by “hey did you know this” that Donner mentions.

The gorilla thing is the most bizarre fact about The Goonies I can think of, and it’s the one thing that maybe makes me seethe more than the weird sexual shit.

Other quirks

Before we get into the more chronological, scene-by-scene discussion, here’s a few oddities I found that I feel are worth a mention.

In terms of product placement, some of the final stuff shown off in the movie is different in the Fourth Draft script. The famous Baby Ruth bar coveted by Sloth is instead an Almond Joy. Mouth mentions Straw Hat Pizza instead of Godfather's. To my shock, there is no mention of Pepsi anywhere in the script.

These were placeholder brands, I suppose, until they produced the go-ahead to use those brands in the movie. Funny enough, Straw Hat was supposed to be used in the final, but pulled out at the last second, and Domino's was eager to take up the spot.

For whatever reason, the map and the doubloon are dated to 1532 rather than 1632. The change for this may be due to historical accuracy, as, until the late 1500s, most pirate activity was located elsewhere. 1632 is more plausible than 1532 in this case. (Thanks to my girlfriend for enlightening me on this!)

Chester Copperpot, instead of a famed explorer, is much more of an eccentric, “reclusive scavenger”. He’s decked out on mining gear in his photo and when they find him down in the caves. The change here is simple, I think, and was done to make the movie feel much more grounded - having a miner in a literal yellow mining hat would kill the realistic magic of the movie, after all.

Mikey inherits his asthma from his father, apparently. A neat little detail.

Coming up is our play-by-play of changes.