Coreys, I love you

"Yeah, but you know what? This one, this one right here, this was my dream, my wish. And it didn't come true. So, I'm taking it back. I'm taking them all back."

Tonight, those words made me weep quietly in the dark of a cinema.

I've heard Corey Feldman speak them a thousand times. As a kid, I heard them weekly as I sat transfixed watching The Goonies every Saturday morning before I went to play soccer. I watched it until the VHS wore thin and no amount of holding down the tracking button improved the grainy picture's quality.

But, tonight in the blackness of the movie auditorium, with my Mum sat next to me, currently unemployed, and a face mask hanging from my neck, those words ripped through my soul. It was the first time in months, I'd had the sweet joy of sitting in front of a big screen to watch a film, and it broke my heart.

The cinemas here in England are back open but distribution companies, it seems, are saving the big new releases till they know there's going to be bums on seats. As a consequence, my local multiplex is showing classic movies so when I saw that my all-time favourite kids' movie, scratch that my all-time favourite movie, The Goonies was showing I knew that it had to be the first film I saw on the silver screen in this post-lockdown Covidian catastrophe, we all now call life.

As I sat there, I realised I'd waited 39 years for that exact moment to watch The Goonies on a big screen. And the moment when 1980s child actor Corey Feldman speaks those lines and adds a small moment of pathos into an otherwise 90 minutes of fun and laughter, I couldn't help but cry.

Had my dreams come true? Am I still waiting for my wish? Was I crying for Corey? Was I crying for his friend Corey Haim? Was I crying for all the 1980s kids whose lives haven't brought the dreams we all hoped for? I think the answer is: all of the above.

I am a child of the 1980s. I am proud to say it despite the mulleted photographs that exist of me in Mum's albums. I am a VHS kid. Weekends in Blockbusters picking movies, video nasties, schlock horror when I was underaged, dystopian Sci-fis, stop-motion animatronics, big hair, power ballads, Eddie Murphy, John Hughes, Joel Schumacher, National Lampoons, baby's in the corner, Ferris Bueller, and Christopher Lambert. I loved everything about 80s' movies. I still do. But I loved nothing more than the two Coreys: Corey Haim and Corey Feldman.

For me, as a young boy growing up in the UK, they were everything I wanted to be. They were the two coolest American Kids I had ever seen and simply put they were in every single one of my favourite films from the era, either individually or, better yet, together.

The Goonies (Corey Feldman)

Lucas (Corey Haim)

Stand by Me (Corey Feldman)

Gremlins (Corey Feldman)

The Lost Boys (Both of them)

License to Drive (Both of them)

They weren't just kid actors in the 1980s. For me, they were the 1980s. They defined the era at the time by the clothes they wore, the phrases they spoke and the way they acted in the films above. And now, perhaps with cruel hindsight and tragedy, they define the 1980s in other ways too as both victims of success, victims of excess and victims of others.

In their films, they represent a time when kids looked for adventure and found adventure. A time when you believed you would die for your friends, and risk life and limb for them whether it was fighting pirates, vampires or multiplying critters.

In a world, before cell phones and social media, only a few kids on the planet were iconic enough to be superstars, and the Coreys were that. Now, thanks to Instagram and Tik Tok we live in a world where every kid is a film star of their own life. Teens around the world have thousands of followers and instant feedback on their mini-movies. Teenage life now, it seems now, is one long film dance in your parent's back yard or bathroom.

Teens have consumer and media power like never before, and they have demonstrated just how effective they can be with it to raise awareness of political injustice (see Ms Aziz on Uighur Muslim) or to disrupt the patriarchy (see K-Pop fans owing Trump), and I have nothing but admiration for them and perhaps a little bit of jealously for the power they have literally in their fingertips which we could have only dreamed of back in the 1980s.

Yet, as I look at the younger people, I see out and about on the streets clutching their phones and filming their lives I recognise some of their fashions from my youth. Thanks to hit TV shows like Stranger Things or movie remakes the 1980s and 90s are definitely back. There is, after all, always that twenty to thirty year lag in popular culture as those writing and making the TV, films and music pine for their youth and reminisce on what has been lost. Don't believe me? Think about how many of the 1980s films are set in the 1950s. Back to the Future being the most iconic of all.

Every kid now has the power to become iconic. Indeed, before the outbreak of Covid-19 arguably one of the most influential and powerful people in the world was a 16-year old Swedish girl called Greta. But back in the 1980s, there was only a handful of child stars and for me none more prominent than the Coreys. But, if the 1980s created the child stars the decade of greed and excess did a good job at destroying them too. To list child stars of the 1980s is unfortunately to list a group of adults who have all found themselves on the wrong side of the law, addicted and broken, or tragically dead. And the Coreys, my two heroes, define that story better (or worse) than most.

I was heartbroken when in 2010 Corey Haim died. He was just 38 -the same age, I am now. He had finally lost his long-fought battle with drugs and addiction. A once childhood superstar making big money had died broken and broke. To add insult to injury, the Hollywood machine that created him didn't even seem to remember him, and, to my dismay, that year he wasn't even included in the Academy Awards In Memoriam tribute.

Corey Feldman has equally being plagued by addiction and controversy through life. In the last few months, he has in fact being pretty prominent again in the headlines for numerous reasons. In February and March of this year, he was promoting his film 'My Truth: The Rape of 2 Coreys' a film which goes a long way to explaining why both these young men's life spiralled out of control. A film which alleges that both of them were sexually abused by several men while making their films together as youngsters. He then appeared triumphantly on Josh Gadd's Goonies Reunited Zoomcast. And even more recently he has had allegations of abuse made against him. Allegations he denies.

Thirty years on when I still watch Mouth, Edgar Frog or Teddy Duchamp I still see a kid who was my hero who made me laugh, made me want to fight the vampires, made we want to search for pirates gold, and made me want to live.

In 2020, however, we're all lost boys. Life is vampiric. A limbo of grey twilight caught between night and day, hope and fear, life and death. The future for everyone seems so uncertain that it's no wonder that tonight I took comfort in feeling like a kid again, pining for my youth and remembering a time when life seemed simpler but was perhaps a lot darker.

Kids today have power, real power to make a difference, to make a change and to be heard. Not all kids and not all kids everywhere. But they do have a voice, and it deserves to be heard. If the two Coreys can teach us anything it's that kids today have earnt that right to be heard.

We're all young once. We all have dreams. We've all made wishes on a coin. But, in truth, how many ever really come true?

Iconic is an overused term. But the two Coreys are deserved of the title – iconic duo. Like all icons, they were worshipped, admired and adored by me as kid. Like other 80s icons, the gold of their imagery may have tarnished and long faded but if I scratch hard enough it still shines enough for me and they are still worth the veneration I gave them as a kid. In the same way that an old religious icon may hang ceremoniously in a house, the iconography of the two Coreys hangs indelibly on the memories of my youth and childhood. And for that, I say thank you.

As every good 80s' kid knows The Goonies never say die and neither do I. As young boys, the Coreys taught me how to dream as a kid and as adults they have taught me how hard the living between the dreams truly is.