The Sandlot 2(2005)

Submitted by Tornado Dragon

While Johnnie (Max Lloyd-Jones) is attending an Independence Day party at Hayley’s (Samantha Burton) house, he gets to chatting with her father, Roger (Greg Germann). Knowing how much that Johnnie loves rockets, Roger tells Johnnie that he intends to go away on a business trip next week, but before he goes, he wants him to come back here on Friday morning so they can take his model space shuttle out for a test flight. Without hesitation, Johnnie accepts. However, when Johnnie returns to the house at the appointed day and time, Roger is not there, having just left for the airport with his wife due to his meeting being scheduled to start earlier than expected. Johnnie soon notices that Roger didn’t lock his garage door before he left, so he goes inside and checks out the model shuttle. Unable to contain his excitement over seeing it fly, he takes it out of the garage and sets it up on the Sandlot so he can launch it himself.

After Johnnie prepares the model for takeoff, he decides to wait for the rest of the Sandlot gang to show up so they can all watch it fly. However, he temporarily dozes off while he is waiting, and this causes the remote control box – which is situated on his lap – to fall and hit the ground, which in turn triggers the launching mechanism. A mortified Johnnie watches helplessly as the shuttle goes right up into outer space, and the fire from its SRBs burns a small crater into the Sandlot. Though Johnnie recovers the SRBs soon after and puts them back in Roger’s garage, the shuttle looks to be lost.

The next day, Johnnie and the rest of the gang are invited by Hayley over to her house to watch an interview that Roger is doing on TV about his model shuttle, and he brings up how it took him and his team two years to make it, how they intend to launch it very soon, and how he considers it to be the most important piece of engineering in the history of mankind. This raises Johnnie’s panic level so high that he runs outside to vomit, and the others, confused by his actions, follow him. They find him standing in the crater at the Sandlot and looking towards the sky, and when they look up there as well to see what he is seeing, they take notice of something making its way down to the ground. When the object comes within their field of vision, Hayley recognizes it as her father’s model shuttle and quickly comes to the conclusion that Johnnie had launched it, and then they all watch in complete shock as it lands in Mr. Mertle’s (James Earl Jones) back yard, where the Great Fear resides (the Great Fear is the son of Mertle’s dog, Hercules, from the first film). Panicked, Hayley tells the others that they need to get that shuttle back or her father is going to kill her, but David (James Willson) suddenly starts to walk back home. Hayley asks him if he is going to help them, and he replies that they ought to just accept that that shuttle is gone and they are never going to get it back. He then continues on his way, leaving the others puzzled by his words (in truth, he was the boy who wore the Rapid Rocket superhero costume who was thought to have been killed by the Great Fear when he was younger. What truly happened was that, on his first day of school, he walked past Mertle’s house and found himself getting chased by the Great Fear, thanks to Mertle forgetting to lock the gate to the back yard the night before. The Great Fear pursued David until he cornered him in a loading yard and bit him on the back of his right leg, and the incident left David with not only a physical scar, but a psychological one as well, because he developed a phobia of dogs that has lasted to the present day. As for Mertle, he had to chain the dog to a battleship anchor in the back yard so it would never leave the yard like that again and bite another kid, and he also created the junk wall as another means of keeping the Great Fear contained).

After Hayley tells the others that they have five days to retrieve the shuttle before Roger returns home, they get to work on figuring out a way to get it back. Unfortunately, the attempts that they make over the next few days all end in failure, and David never shows up to lend a hand at any point. After their final attempt goes bust, Johnnie chats with Hayley alone and tells her that he will see to it that he takes full responsibility for the loss of the shuttle. Hayley then asks him where David is because she thought that he would come back, but she is hesitant to explain why. Johnnie tells her that he knows what she was about to say, and he informs her that David really does like her; he has just never admitted this to her simply because boys don’t do that. He then asks her if she ever told David how she felt about him, and she responds to this by asking Johnnie to tell David for her. When he asks why, she answers that she thinks that David is the fastest boy that she has ever seen and she thought that maybe he could be the one to get the shuttle back. Johnnie soon tells Hayley to wait here and promises to return.

Later on, the Sandlot gang returns to the Sandlot, but this time, David is with them, having been convinced by Johnnie (off-screen) to make an attempt to get back the shuttle for Hayley after Johnnie told him how Hayley felt about him. David puts on a new pair of Nike sneakers that he purchased, since Nike – the Greek goddess of victory that inspired the shoe brand’s name – inspired the most courageous and chivalrous warriors, and David has decided to become such a warrior. He then ties the laces of his old shoes together and throws them over the top of a nearby telephone wire. David then shows the gang that he is still in possession of his Rapid Rocket cape, and Hayley quickly identifies him as the kid who was attacked by the Great Fear.

David climbs over the junk wall and steps down into the yard, and moments later, the Great Fear emerges. David then takes out the cape, and the Great Fear – now recognizing who David is – charges at him. However, David throws the cape over the dog’s head to confuse it, then picks up a cable that Mac left in the yard from a previous attempt to get the shuttle back and attaches it to the shuttle, which enables Mac and the others to pull it through a pre-dug tunnel and come out on their side of the wall. David then escapes back over the barrier, but the Great Fear breaks free of its chain and follows him over. David hops on his bicycle and pedals away, and the Great Fear chases after him while the other kids follow them both on their own bicycles. The chase goes across town until David crashes his bicycle in the same loading yard where the Great Fear bit him, after which he runs on foot all the way back to the Sandlot. David hops back onto the junk wall and jumps down into Mertle’s yard, but he crashes back-first onto the section of ground where the tunnel is, which causes the ground to give out from under him and bury him under a lot of dirt. When the Great Fear hops over after him, he causes the entire junk wall to topple over into the Sandlot. The kids go into the yard and start trying to dig David out before he suffocates, but the Great Fear soon steps in and unearths David before pulling his unconscious body out. When David awakens seconds later, the Great Fear returns his cape to him, and David gives him his thanks before finding out that his actual name is Goliath.

Johnnie and David then knock on Mr. Mertle’s back door, and after Mertle answers it, they tell him that they brought Goliath home. When Mertle asks how he got out, Johnnie explains that they lost something in his back yard, and when they tried to get it back, they knocked his wall down. Surprised, Mertle tells Johnnie all about what his older brother, Scott, and his friends did with his prior dog, Hercules, 10 years earlier, and how they didn’t knock on his door and ask him to get their lost baseball back for them because they had heard a crazy story about him being a mean old man who raised dogs to eat children. Johnnie then explains what he and his friends were trying to retrieve from his yard, as well as how they didn’t ask for his help because of the aforementioned crazy story. Mertle then remarks that that wall they knocked down was a “sculpture” of his that took him three years to build, and David promises Mertle that he and his friends will fix it. Suddenly, Goliath takes off, but Mertle tells the gang to just let him go because he is probably just going off for “a visit.” Mertle then makes a deal with the kids where, in exchange for having all the junk cleaned out of here, they must give Goliath a walk twice a week (presumably because his age keeps him from doing that himself). He also remarks that they must play baseball all summer long so he can listen to the games because he misses the games that the old Sandlot gang used to play. He then declares that he won’t put up any more fences, having gotten tired of people thinking that he is grouchy (though he does have a small picket fence put up later for aesthetics).

The gang soon finds out that the reason why Goliath is always trying to get out of the yard is because he likes to visit Tiny, a female bullmastiff who shares a mutual attraction with him. After discovering this, the gang decide to go and get some pizza, but David and Hayley hang back for a moment to chat with each other. Hayley thanks David for retrieving her father’s shuttle for her, and then the two of them share a kiss before leaving hand-in-hand to catch up with the others. The adult Johnnie narrates that that was the summer that David taught him the greatest lesson in life: Love conquers all, even your greatest fear.

As Johnnie puts the model shuttle back into Roger’s garage, he starts to tell the viewers what became of himself and everyone else:

• Roger never found out that Johnnie launched his model shuttle, but it didn’t matter, because his blueprints were America’s future in space, not the model.
• Goliath and Tiny had five puppies. Hayley, Jenny (McKenzie Freemantle), and Penny (Jessica King) each got one to keep as a pet, and Mr. Mertle kept the other two.
• Mac (Brett Kelly) joined the Army after high school. He got wounded in the Gulf War, won a Purple Heart, and joined the Peace Corps.
• Fingers (Sean Berdy) and Saul (Cole Evan Weiss) started a record label for a new kind of music called “hip-hop,” and they named their company “Deaf Jam Records” (since Fingers is deaf).
• Fingers later used the fortune he made in the music business to start Kissing Booth Bubblegum, which became the most successful gum company on the planet.
• Jenny and Penny would each raise three kids and lived happily ever after with their families.
• It was said that Tarqell (Neilen Benvegnu) was abducted by aliens on March 21, 1986, and no one ever saw him again.
• Hayley became a supermodel when she grew up. She also became a pitcher for the U.S. Olympic women’s softball team and won two gold medals with them.
• After David defeated Goliath, he became known as David “Rocket” Durango. He and Hayley went through high school together, but they split up after graduation. Ten years after college, they met again and rekindled their old flame, and they wound up getting married.
• When he reached adulthood, Johnnie went to work for the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, having never lost his passion for rockets.

Closing texts state that David’s old shoes hung on the telephone wire above the Sandlot for a long time. One day, someone found them and took them – but that’s another story….