Hey You Guuuuuuuyyyyys!

We’re not sure the last time you pulled out your copy of The Goonies soundtrack, but it’s stacked with 10 absolute bangers from some early-1980s legends. Cyndi Lauper, who was still riding a wave of She’s So Unusual-powered popularity, kicks things off with “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough”; Earth, Wind, and Fire powerhouse Philip Bailey insists that “Love is Alive”; and The Bangles, REO Speedwagon and Toto’s second-or-third-best frontman all feature elsewhere on the album. 

But one of the best tracks on the entire record was sliced right out of the movie. “Eight Arms to Hold You,” which was credited to a prefab dance group called The Goon Squad, was supposed to play in a bonkers scene near the end of the film, but the sequence was ultimately scrapped. The song was such a bop, though, that it still went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart. 

Although the name of the song was pulled from the original title of The Beatles movie that ended up being called Help!, it works because there’s actually an octopus in the scene. Well, it’s not a real octopus, and that’s part of the reason why it was axed from the flick in the first place.

“Some people who really follow it know that there was an octopus sequence at the end of the movie, before we left the pirate ship chamber, where a giant, ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ size octopus starts attacking us, and a couple of the kids fend it off,” Sean Astin, who played Mikey, told Insider in 2017. “But it didn’t look that good, so they didn’t leave it in the film.” (He added that he’d “never seen” the octopus part.) 

In the scene, the wonky looking octopus drags Stef (Martha Plimpton) and Mouth (Corey Feldman) underwater, and they flail around until Data (Ke Huy Quan) pulls out a presumably waterproof Walkman, jams it in the cephalopod’s mouth, and it literally dances away as a slightly muffled version of “Eight Arms to Hold You” plays in the background. If you’re thinking “Wow, that sounds like absolute shit,” you’re not wrong. 

(As a bonus fact, Eight Arms to Hold You was also the name of the second record by Chicago grrl-group Veruca Salt, which means they managed to combine references to both The Goonies and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in a single release. That alone should qualify them for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.) 

If you need to hear the song – or see a fake-ass octopus being force-fed a cassette player – it’s widely available on YouTube, and it was included as a deleted scene in some DVD releases of the film. You’re welcome. 

This week’s Video Rewind features The Goonies…although not the octopus scene. You’ll still love it. Here it is!

^{Featured image courtesy of: Peter Morgan, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0}