Richard Donner Cut The Goonies' Octopus Attack For A Simple Reason
Ke Huy Quan enjoyed a pretty remarkable Hollywood comeback in 2022 thanks to a well-received performance in "Everything Everywhere All At Once" that would go on to become an awards season favorite. It's been great to see for fans of the actor, many of whom grew up watching him as a child in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" and "The Goonies." He was one of the most memorable parts of both of those films, but when it comes to "The Goonies," one of the reasons his character Data is so memorable is because of a cryptic comment he makes to a reporter in the final scene: "The octopus was very scary!"
Except, there was no octopus in the movie. Or at least, not in the version that played in theaters. As you may well know, director Richard Donner actually did shoot a sequence with the film's young heroes having to fend off an octopus in the cave that houses One-Eyed Willy's pirate ship. In fact, you can watch the deleted scene on YouTube and it's even popped up in cable edits of "The Goonies" over the years. It certainly adds a lot more context to Data's line, which just comes across as nonsense without having seen an actual octopus in the theatrical cut. So, then ... why did Donner decide to leave the sequence on the cutting room floor? Well, there's a pretty obvious reason, actually.
The simplest explanation turns out to be the correct one
You've probably heard of Occam's Razor, but in case you're unfamiliar, it's a problem-solving principle that states the simplest solution is often the correct one. And when it comes to the octopus in "The Goonies," Richard Donner's explanation for why it was cut is as simple as it gets: "Because it was bad."
Well, certainly makes sense to us. And as you can see if you watch the deleted scene, he certainly wasn't wrong. The scene was extraneous, and didn't really do much for the plot, but at the most base level it just didn't look good. In a movie where the visuals really stand out, it probably would have been distracting to have a very fake looking animatronic trying to drown the kids. Donner decided to keep Ke Huy Quan's line in, however, because he liked the mystery. It wasn't the only line that made no sense that was kept in the final cut, either. As he told AssignmentX in a 2010 interview:
"It was fun and it baited the audiences. If you listen to the movie carefully, you're going to hear Sean [Astin] call Josh Brolin, 'Josh' twice –- and it's in the movie. I spotted it the first time the other night, but I knew the other one was there. So I figured, just leave them in, it keeps people guessing."
Given the fact that the octopus has been a topic of discussion for closing in on 40 years, we definitely can't argue.