Rocky balboa music video training movie#
Rocky balboa music video training series#

Rocky balboa music video training series#

The character of Rocky was always subject to indignities, and in some ways, the silliness of Rocky II through V were just another part of the trials he was subjected to.Īll this sets the scene for his triumphant return in Rocky Balboa, which takes the series back to its roots. Throughout, even when films were terrible, there was always affection for the central character himself. If we’re honest, it isn’t just the moments of quality in the series that we remember fondly: it’s also the cheesy theatrics of Rocky’s opponents the music-video training montages Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger Mr T the exultant freeze-frames after Rocky’s inevitable triumphs.

Rocky balboa music video training movie#

Even when they weren’t very good, they defined their times ( Rocky IV might be the “eighties-est” movie ever made). The Rocky series was a mainstay for (mostly) male filmgoers of a certain age: a staple on VHS and Beta cassettes, and regularly repeated on TV back when people still watched movies on television. It’s a little more than that though – the nostalgia for the series is tied up with all the films, good and bad. With Rocky Balboa taking the series back to its roots, it’s tempting to say that this fondness stems only from our memories of the original the one respectable, Oscar-winning, “proper” film in the series.

By Rocky IV, as Stallone faced off in a symbolic cold-war bout between America and Russia, the series was a joke.Īnd yet there’s a lot of fondness for Rocky out there. After the founding film the series fell apart in small increments, with each instalment becoming more cartoonish, overwhelming the simple dignity of the title character. So while the story is pure fluff, the film was built on solid elements such as the performances of Stallone and his costars, and the character of its Philadelphia locations. Like a lot of late-seventies proto-blockbusters, it paired the simple genre narrative that would define eighties blockbuster filmmaking with the realist edge of seventies New Hollywood in doing so it got the best of both worlds. The original Rocky was a fairy-tale, but it was a gritty one, set in a run-down, semi-deserted Philadelphia.

To what extent can our years of association with a character transform our experience of a movie? Can a major motion picture get by on nostalgia alone? The answer, in this case, is that yes, it can. Sylvester Stallone’s new Rocky movie, Rocky Balboa, is an experiment in the power of sentiment.