1985 · Behind the Songs
Steven Spielberg asked for a song; she ended up running the whole soundtrack.
In 1984, Cyndi Lauper wrote a song called “Good Enough” with Stephen Broughton Lunt and Arthur Stead. When Steven Spielberg’s adventure film The Goonies needed a theme, Warner Bros. saw an opportunity and rechristened it “The Goonies ’R’ Good Enough” for marketing purposes. Released on June 6, 1985 as the lead single from the film’s soundtrack — with “What a Thrill” on the B-side — and co-produced by Lauper with Lennie Petze, it became her fifth Top-Ten single.
The chart run was brisk: it entered the Hot 100 at No. 45 in the week of May 18, 1985, reached the Top 40 at No. 36 on June 1, and peaked at No. 10 on July 13, spending fifteen weeks on the chart in all. It also reached the top ten in Australia and Canada, where it was certified Gold.
The two-part video, directed by the film’s own director Richard Donner, was an event in itself: Part 1 premiered on MTV on May 7, 1985, Part 2 after the film opened on June 7. Alongside Lauper appeared a roll call of 1980s wrestling — “Captain” Lou Albano, “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, Wendi Richter, The Fabulous Moolah, The Iron Sheik, Nikolai Volkoff and Freddie Blassie, with André the Giant joining for Part 2 — plus cameos from Spielberg, the young Goonies cast, and The Bangles as a band of lady pirates. Spielberg had asked Lauper to serve as musical director for the soundtrack, and she repaid the favor by bringing her friends The Bangles onto it.
The song’s later life is full of small ironies. Lauper left it off her 1994 compilation Twelve Deadly Cyns…and Then Some, then restored it for 2003’s The Essential Cyndi Lauper. It turned up as the parody “Taffy Butt” on Bob’s Burgers in 2012 — reportedly at the request of her son, a fan of the show — and anchored a Goonies-themed episode of The Goldbergs in 2014. Lauper herself once called the song “terrible,” stopped singing it live after 1987, and eventually brought it back by popular demand, sometimes performing it a cappella.