Yesterday was July 4th, and the movie channel AMC celebrated by having a Rocky marathon. I’m a sucker for the Rocky movies. The original Rocky (1976) is clearly a masterpiece. It was subtle, bleak, realistic, hopeful, and filled with great original characters. Rocky II continues the tone of the first, but is more serialized and a little bit redundant. Rocky III and onwards are full blown cartoons of 80s excess. The worst movie of the bunch, Rocky V, is an absolute train wreck of a movie. In 2010, Stallone admitted he made the movie out of greed.  In an attempt to make Rocky more of the everyman he originally was, they radically change his life. First off, Rocky loses all of his money on account of Paulie (Burt Young) making some bad investments. This forces Rocky to move back to the Philly inner city with his family and start over. If I remember correctly, even Adrian (Talia Shire) goes back to work for the pet store she worked at in Rocky I. Insane. All Rocky would have to do, considering he established himself as the greatest American boxer ever, is make a few endorsements and he’d back on his feet financially. Anyway, Rocky begins training some stupid young boxer, his kid Rocky Jr. (Stallone’s real life son Sage) begins to resent him, and it ends with Rocky kickboxing Tommy Gunn (Tommy Morrison) all over the streets of Philly. It’s incredibly bad. However, the one thing that always got to me about Rocky V were the end credits. It’s a montage of all the Rocky films up to that point, with Elton John’s “Measure of a Man” playing in the background. The song, in proud Rocky tradition, is sappy, sentimental, cheesy, and overblown. Still, like the Rocky movies, its kind of touching and very memorable. I had no idea that this was Sir Elton until this morning when I looked it up. I also didn’t know this song was nominated for a Golden Raspberry for worse song in a movie…it lost…Hah! Well, to me, this is proof that the song isn’t that bad, so I’m sticking on my website despite the haters.  Enjoy.

PS: Youtube won’t let me embed the version with credits on my website, but I do have a link to it if you want to see the famous Rocky montage, just click these words.