The original “Rocky” (1976) and “Rocky II” (1979) tell the story of an ordinary, underestimated “bum” reaching deep down and discovering the champion within.
#Rocky balboa speech text to son series
The series is really a classic trilogy, with each installation in diptych form. In the pre-“Creed” cycle of six films, Stallone always gives himself two chances to tell the same story-as if, no matter how big it may have hit, he’s not quite satisfied with his first telling. Rocky is a man of many virtues, but above all he stands for determination, and this is clearly inherited from his author.
Throughout, he has maintained in his imagination a place where he can scrub away any such blemishes on his soul, leaving only the simple, heroic Balboa. I offer evidence of decadence not to damn him but merely to note that, living in an atmosphere of perpetual temptation, he has been vulnerable to it. A career checkered by several take-the-money-and-run flops lamentable enough that he must keep a quiver of self-deprecating jokes at the ready, should one of them be mentioned. Three marriages, the latter two to models. Over the decades, he’s indulged in all the predictable conspicuous consumptions, including human-growth hormone and testosterone. Stallone himself, in interviews, comes off about as generous and self-aware as you could possibly ask a Hollywood megastar to be, which is still quite a far cry from Rocky’s saintliness. Across four decades, we’ve witnessed a full-blown, epic saga of a man perpetually considering, but never achieving, retirement. But, whereas Doinel’s fictional life was defined, as any self-mythologizing Frenchman’s would be, in terms of his relationships with a series of stunning women, Rocky must measure himself always in his workplace: the ring. How many other Part 7s can you name with nary a gun or spaceship in sight? In its very human focus, the “Rocky” series is, oddly, the closest analogue that American cinema has produced to François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel cycle. Among blockbuster franchises, “Rocky” stands out as surely the unlikeliest. To be clear, it is the old man who is encouraging the young man to wrap up his career.Įvery moviegoer knows well that Rocky did no such thing-indeed, with the release, this Thanksgiving, of “Creed,” a new spin-off of the series in which he’ll serve as the trainer and inspiration to the son of his former opponent, Apollo Creed, Rocky is still in business.
This exchange occurs early in the first “Rocky” movie, between the salty, wizened trainer Mickey Goldmill (Burgess Meredith) and a big-hearted but disappointing club fighter named Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone). “Hey, kid-you ever think about retiring?”
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