Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/25/remembering-the-truffle-shuf.html
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Nah, even when I was the target demographic for this shit I knew it was cruel.
Also, Data was the best, tho I’m worried it may lean too heavily into wacky Asian stereotypes on rewatch.
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Yeah, the way Chunk reacted to body-shaming abuse from his so-called friends was the best!
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“Chester Copperpot!”
That’s showing gen x-ness.
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My favorite parts are the line “let go of me, you gross old witch!”, which I use often, and Sloth’s inexplicably prehensile ears. I never really got why people were so excited about the part where the heroes bully their friend.
Tough crowd, @jlw. But yes, i remember the Truffle Shuffle. I also remember boys in a group constantly haze and tease each other. In high school I somehow got the nick name KoJack - rhymes with my real last name - and it was used so much that people who didn’t know me thought it was a real name. So i got the obnoxious pet name, and others got it in other ways. None of that was in any way similar to the actually bullying I had by others.
Goonies is still a classic. Had the kiddo watch it last year. Getting caught up on the greats of the time.
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Oh this guy, who used to do documentaries under “No Small Parts”, sold the brand to IMDB, but he is putting the films back out under the name The Back Focus. Here is a great video about the life and career of Anne Ramsey, AKA Mama Fratelli.
For what it’s worth Jeff Cohen, the child actor who played Chunk, is now a successful entertainment lawyer who appears to have a much healthier BMI than me.
I attended a special screening of The Goonies once at which he was the host. He seems to have a lot of fond memories of the experience, body-shaming or no. Of course other people who were overweight kids in the 80s might not have quite the same nostalgia for that dance.
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Even kids like me who weren’t overweight (but were still bullied) cringed* at that scene.
* Plus now, the striking similarity to that one chubby kid from CovCath doing a bigoted impression of ‘the sumo’ just makes it extra cringe-worthy IMO.
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I have a hunch that the way “Data” was portrayed didn’t do much good for Asian-American kids of the era either.
Interestingly Jonathan Ke Quan (the actor who played Data and also Short Round from Temple of Doom) ended up being one of Cohen’s first clients when the latter became an entertainment lawyer.
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He was part of the gang. They made fun of him for his weird stories, his clumsiness, his eating, but he was welcome. He wasn’t there so they could make fun of him, he didn’t “live with it” for the sake of being included in some way, they were all outcasts in some way and they bonded.
I don’t know if the film reflects a reality, but other characters get some of the same treatment, but it’s not the same as when some group is targeting an outsider.
I was older than the intended audience when it came out, but I like it a lot. I remember camping in Oregon in the rain for what seemed like a long time when I was three or four. The best time to be on the beach is when there’s fog, and low tide, take in all the tidal pools. I’d go to Astoria if they invited me, though when they had their 200th anniversary in 2011 (they count not from when Astoria started but when Fort Astoria went up in 1811), but nobody did, though one of the Astors in England got an invite. But if people like my great, great, great grandfather hadn’t been there in 1811, they’d not have the same longevity. I didn’t know when the movie came out that he’d been there at the start.
I’ve seen account that he dww pirate ships though.
I’d point out that “the fat guy” in “Stand By Me” gets similar treatment at the start of the film, having to do something before they let him into the treehouse. And Jerry O’Connell turned out okay too.
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Word.
So many of my favorite movies from my childhood contain some deeply problematic imagery and ideas. And I say that as someone who owns The Goonies and Sixteen Candles on dvd.
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The real problem with the “Truffle Shuffle” wasn’t that it humiliated Chunk (who was, after all, a fictional character).
The problem was that it immediately and predictably became a joke used to humiliate an entire generation of overweight kids in the real world.
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Casablanca treats women like objects. It is still an amazing film. It is just horribly dated. Our understanding of “kids will be kids” in the 80s is different from now. If the 2019 Goonies parents let them go OUTDOORS ALONE, they would be wearing helmets, shoulder pads and would have a cellphone to call for help.
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Yes, it is.
Fair point; lots of old classic, iconic movies contain very problematic even antisocial ideas that are no longer considered acceptable by civilized society.
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True. There’s a reason that Super 8 and Stranger Things are set in the 80s; if you made a movie about a scrappy group of kids solving mysteries in contemporary times they’d spend half the movie looking stuff up on Google.
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Wikipedia Brown
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It’s great that Donner recognised it during the shoot, but that doesn’t explain the “jiggling” sound effect that was added in during post-production (unless I’m mis-hearing it).
I loved the movie, liked the Chunk character (who, as I recall, was the most compassionate of the bunch and made friends with Sloth). But although Jeff Cohen has a sense of humour about the dance, I’ll be happy if such gags about hazing don’t appear in movies and TV as comic relief anymore.
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