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You know the type. Get a group of wise-cracking misfit kids. They have an attitude right out of an old school issue of MAD magazine. They get involved in an incredible (or at least unlikely) series of adventures, usually involving an element (or at least a hint) of something fantastical.
Iconic examples include:
The Goonies
Explorers
The Monster Squad
Adventures in Babysitting
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
...there were many more, of course.
What film did you like best?
I ask because it seems to be making a comeback. Monster House deliberately modeled itself on this type of film. The idea for a Goonies 2 refuses to die. Remakes of Adventures in Babysitting and Monster Squad are on the way. The cashing in on my childhood will apparently not be limited to toy lines.
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To clarify: You aren't limited to these choices, these are just the first examples that sprang to my mind of that type of movie. Posts: 6689 | Registered: Jan 2005
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The Goonies. I have large portions of that movie memorized because my sisters and I watched it so many times.
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quote:Originally posted by xnera: The Goonies. I have large portions of that movie memorized because my sisters and I watched it so many times.
Ditto and I even watched other things because they had actors from that movie in them. I followed Sean Astins Career after seeing that movie..I honestly thought that group would be the next brat pack.
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Didn't The Goonies 2 come out already? I think it was on Ninendo instead of video, however.
According to Sean Astin (Mikey), a sequel to The Goonies is all but completely certain. In fact, there was almost a Goonies animated series that fell apart in 2006-2007 due to rights to likeness issues. Other follow-ups are being looked into, due to the high DVD sales for the original film.
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quote:Originally posted by xnera: The Goonies. I have large portions of that movie memorized because my sisters and I watched it so many times.
Ditto and I even watched other things because they had actors from that movie in them. I followed Sean Astins Career after seeing that movie..I honestly thought that group would be the next brat pack.
I had a crush on Martha Plimpton for years after watching that film.
quote:Originally posted by xnera: The Goonies. I have large portions of that movie memorized because my sisters and I watched it so many times.
Ditto and I even watched other things because they had actors from that movie in them. I followed Sean Astins Career after seeing that movie..I honestly thought that group would be the next brat pack.
I had a crush on Margaret Plimpton for years after watching that film.
Didn't we all?!?
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quote:Originally posted by Irami Osei-Frimpong: I thought Goonies would win in a walk, but then I remembered, "Flight of the Navigator."
That was a fun movie, though I recall there was only one kid, right?
(Two, if you count his little brother who becomes his twenty-something big brother due to lost time!)
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I haven't seen any of the movies mentioned so far as an adult. I'm going strictly from childhood memories here.
Posts: 4077 | Registered: Jun 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Puffy Treat: Watching Explorers as an adult, I still like it right up until the point we actually -meet- the aliens.
Then, I have to switch it off.
I even felt that way as a kid. If they would have not tried to do it so comedically I think it would have worked...all their knowledge from television and radio waves. But they made the aliens look so cartoonish and the one act like Orson Wells, I could never stand it.
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(He's done work for shows like Kim Possible, so he's no stranger to youth-oriented action/adventure comedies.)
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I don't remember which one "The Explorers" is, but Goonies certainly.
And I was JUST humming the music to Newsies at work today. Weird. I count Newsies, it's an adventure in children's rights.
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And adventure in child rights? Fie upon you! Fie, I say. And anyway, it's a 1992 movie. Doesn't count.
Explorers is a movie about three misfit kids- a romantic dreamer obsessed with SF, a science nerd, and a tough kid with a heart of gold. The dreamer kid, Ben, keeps having vivid recurring dreams which he believes might be a message of some sort. Working with scientist-in-the-making Wolfgang, they build a machine based on imagery seen in his dream. Soon after they meet the tough but nice new kid Darren, and then they all start to have recurring dreams that seem to be linked to the device. Turns out it can generate a force field...and that leads to further dreams that eventually result in them building a space craft of sorts. That leads to some thrilling night time escapades, reports of "UFOs" in the area...and eventually a journey to find who has been sending the messages...
The film up until they meet the alien messengers is actually really good. One of Joe Dante's better genre efforts. And I'm including the Gremlins duology in that estimation! It manages to capture the sense of wonder, discovery, and even a melancholy wistfulness quite well.
Then, they meet the aliens. And it all turns to the cinematic equivalent of eating Nerds candy that's been dipped in vanilla frosting: Like, totally grody-gooey-sickly-sweet.
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Stand by Me, Space Camp and Red Dawn are great too! What about is it Ruskies...the one where the kids go to save their parents from the Soviet interment camps.
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Russkies with future Acadamy Award winner Joaquin Phoenix. Second best adolescent adventure movie from the 80's involving a Russian invasion of the US mainland.
<edit>but now I see lostinspace was talking about some other Russo-centric 80's teen adventure movie. My bad</edit>
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Do the WarGames characters fit the paradigm? It's been years since I've seen it, but I don't recall them seeming like the plucky wise-cracking quirky misfit hero types.
Never saw Real Geniuses. What's it about?
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Trying to pick another 80s movie about a group of wise-cracking misfit kids on an unlikely adventure to even come close to competing with The Goonies is like asking "What early 90s time-travelling cyborg assassin movie do you like as much as Terminator 2: Judgement Day?"
quote:Originally posted by Puffy Treat: Do the WarGames characters fit the paradigm? It's been years since I've seen it, but I don't recall them seeming like the plucky wise-cracking quirky misfit hero types.
quote:Originally posted by Puffy Treat: Do the WarGames characters fit the paradigm? It's been years since I've seen it, but I don't recall them seeming like the plucky wise-cracking quirky misfit hero types.
Well, they're older teens, but you have the Matthew Broderick, socially backward, computer hacker character running off with the more popular, pretty girl (IIRC), much like Goonies if Sean Astin and Josh Brolin's characters were merged, and they'd run off with Kerri Green to save not their community but the whole world.
quote:Never saw Real Geniuses. What's it about?
Real Genius is an early Val Kilmer vehicle about genius students at a California Polytechnic University who invent and then go on a mission to stop, a space-based tactical laser. The "mission" part (stopping the laser) is quite brief, and the characters are somewhat older (although the everyman protagonist is 15), but it has some of the same flavor. Its a pretty funny script, and Kilmer's character is a model of what every geek wishes he could be, someone who uses his genius to be incredibly cool (in a very geeky way).
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quote:Originally posted by SenojRetep: Russkies with future Acadamy Award winner Joaquin Phoenix. Second best adolescent adventure movie from the 80's involving a Russian invasion of the US mainland.
<edit>but now I see lostinspace was talking about some other Russo-centric 80's teen adventure movie. My bad</edit>
Yeah I guess I was thinking of The Rescue. And it was North Korea not Russia but hey it was 20 years ago! But it does make me want to go back and watch a lot of these old movies!
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Not that it would be my first choice, but I can't believe that no one has mentioned Gremlins yet.
Back to the Future would probably be my choice.... it mostly fits, better than Real Genius. That, by the way is one of the most quotable movies of the 80s, right alongside The Princess Bride and (another movie that ought to be on this list) Better Off Dead.
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Better off Dead featured a group of snarky misfit kids on an adventure? I thought that was John Cusack's suicide attempts being played for laughs?
Gremlins sort of counts, though technically it's more a nascent romantic couple featured than a group, and they're more sincere than snarky.
Back to the Future is great, but it's just one teen and a wacky adult friend. Posts: 6689 | Registered: Jan 2005
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I think those are getting away from the initial parameters (Goonies, natch), but if we're including those type of teen movies, the clear winner is Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
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I don't count Ferris Bueller as an adventurer. More the Wish Fulfillment fantasy of lazy teens everywhere. Posts: 6689 | Registered: Jan 2005
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If we get in there and start nitpicking then we could try to put the Breakfast Club in there too.
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