The original Goonies teaser trailer. Image : Annapurna

While everyone remembers The Goonies’ full, very ‘80s-appropriate trailer that introduces its characters and a significant chunk of its plot, there was also a very clever teaser trailer that, for a brief period of time, was shown in theaters during the months before the film’s release.


It’s a far cry from what we’d describe as a proper teaser by today’s standards, but looking back at it, you can’t help but appreciate the modern kind of hype it was designed to build in audience’s minds. In case you hadn’t seen it before, Annapurna posted a rare video of The Goonies’ teaser to its Twitter account and, well, it’s a teaser in the truest sense of the word, rather than a 30-second long trailer that’s really just meant to be GIFed to hell and spread on social media like the plague.


There are no plot details or even actors to look at, but instead the film’s title is spelled out with the help of a number of other iconic films like Gremlins, The Omen, Raiders of the Lost Arc, Close Encounters of the Second Kind, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, E.T., and, Superman.

Simple as the teaser is, it speaks to the state of cinema in the mid-’80s and what kinds of films were both dominating at the box office and captivating people’s imaginations. Today, a teaser like this would lead one to assume that characters from each of those films would be teaming up or facing off against one another on the same screen for the first time— w hich makes it all the more interesting to consider that back then, it was really meant to be taken just at face value.

Imagine a world where studios still assumed audiences were interested in seeing films that were completely unrelated to one another. How quaint.


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