This week on Make Me a Nerd, Mandy Kaplan does the bravest thing a grown adult can do: she prescribes herself a medically unnecessary, emotionally essential dose of The Goonies—because sometimes “self-care” is a bubble bath, and sometimes it’s screaming “HEY YOU GUYS” into the void until the void screams back. Joined by recurring fan-favorite guest Krissy Lenz (of The Most Excellent 80s Movies), Mandy revisits Richard Donner’s chaotic, sweet, frequently-overlapping-yelling masterpiece and marvels at how it manages to be simultaneously a kids’ adventure film and a movie that opens with a fake suicide and drops the S-word roughly nineteen times like it’s being paid per syllable.They dig into why the character introductions during the opening chase are basically a clinic in “how to meet an ensemble cast fast,” why Brand deserves a modern reappraisal as the patron saint of big-brother competence, and why pirates apparently had both scurvy and an interior designer on payroll. Along the way, the conversation detours into Corey Feldman lore (including the surreal fact of Corey Feldman calling Krissy directly because he couldn’t get into the recording app), the weirdly persistent “octopus scene” ghost that’s referenced even when cut, and the uncomfortable 80s habit of using fat-shaming as a punchline so routinely you can practically hear a studio executive chanting, “Yes, yes, keep punching down, it’s working.”And because Mandy’s brain is both tender and mischievous, we also get: a brief masterclass in “planning crimes vs committing crimes” (involving a pizza smuggled into a movie theater), a quick Make Me a Nerd sidebar into the threat of scurvy in modern adulthood, and a round of Goonies trivia that ends exactly the way it should: with friendship intact and pride mildly wounded.Make Me a Nerd:

• Website: makemeanerd.com/join
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