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‘Rocky’ adds muscle to the American dream

‘Rocky’ adds muscle to the American dream

You know you’ve made it when they make a onesie in your honour. Rocky’s is iconically straightforward: it is black with a red hood, it shows a pair of red gloves hanging around the neck, and across the shoulders the word ‘Rocky’ is displayed in typically solid white capitals. There is something so simple and straightforward about the whole Rocky franchise that makes it irresistible – but there is more to the story than just the commercialisation.

In truth, Sylvester Stallone’s eponymous hero was a merchandising man’s dream – or to put it another way, Stallone captured something of the American dream in his humble, heart-as-big-as-a-lion hero: American dreams have always been in fashion.

Rocky’s old-time values, his decency and his uncomplicated determination to do the right thing were a perfect token of what it meant to be American in the 1980s. Rocky was straightforwardly one of the good guys in the world. Who wouldn’t want a piece of that to take home with them?

But Stallone also tapped into a more subtle aspect of the zeitgeist. Tough guys with a heart may have been a Hollywood staple long before Stallone found himself an out of work actor looking for a break. But his character’s combination of – for the time – a super developed, super exposed body with that resonant blue collar heroism brought muscles out of the gym and into the mainstream.

 

From cinema screens and from a billion bedroom posters Rocky’s portrayal of what it meant to be a man was part of a turn towards a more body-conscious mentality that we now see on every street in every town throughout the Western world. Jean Claude van Damme and a beefed-up Bruce Willis were part of the same tide, but it is Rocky – upright and unbeaten – who is the iconic figure of the movement.

No wonder Rocky’s image is to be found on so many mugs, and T shirts, and baseball caps and onesies, and no wonder you can play Rocky slots and games at so many online sites and resorts around the world. Those simple motifs are the very fabric of our popular culture. In effect, they are telling us who we are and what we stand for. The fact they come wrapped in sort of timeless, misty-eyed nostalgia only adds to their potency.

Rocky

Source:https://flic.kr/p/5V3541

With box office figures for the films running to a cool $126 million it’s not hard to see how hitting the jackpot and the idea of Rocky go together – a key strand of the whole story is a humble working guy’s journey from rags to riches. That American dream pulses through every aspect of the story, right through to Stallone’s personal biography. He was the down and out actor looking for a break, and it was his hard graft and his grit and determination that saw the journey through to a happy ending.

But the truth is that Stallone’s personal success and the box office figures are not the greatest part of the story. It is in the easily overlooked message about all that body conscious muscularity where Rocky really packed a punch. Every poster, every, slot and every branded onesie carries that beefed up message. In other words, Rocky added some muscle to the American dream.

 

 

 

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