ROCKYSGIVING: Rocky

We embark on a week-long journey of Rocky Balboa’s career with the film that started it all.

Rocky is such a cultural phenomenon that it’s easy to forget it’s really a low-budget, independent slice-of-life drama made on the promise of one compelling actor and screenwriter who had an idea for a story he needed to tell. A $900,000 film wound up grossing over $250 million dollars worldwide and won a Best Picture Oscar against some of the greatest films in American cinema. We can’t say we were blown away by this movie, because it’s not perfect. But damned if it doesn’t charm you into loving it, whether it’s Rocky training hard to face an undefeated foe, or Adrian slowly but surely emerging from her shell and falling in love. Rocky Balboa is a meathead, but he’s our meathead, and we salute him in our first episode in our Thanksgiving Rocky-thon!

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Intro music taken from the Second Movement of Ludwig von Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Hong Kong (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 HK) license. To hear the full performance or get more information, visit the song page at the Internet Archive.

“Fanfare for Rocky” taken from the Score for Rocky, written and composed by Bill Conti. ℗ 2015 United Artists Corporation. Full soundtrack can be found at iTunes and Amazon.