Sylvester Stallone Knocked Out by Earnie Shavers at Rocky III Audition is an excellent piece written by Lee Cleveland for Fight Saga.
Category: Rocky III
Peterik, Sly and “Eye of the Tiger”
Jim Peterik of Survivor, recently spoke to Dan Weiss about his career and working with Sly to create Eye of the Tiger. Here’s a taste…
Were you a big fan of the prior Rocky movies or boxing before Stallone approached you?
Huge fan of Rocky I, and II was good, too, my wife and I were really into it. So when I got home that fateful day in early 1982, I had a message on my answering machine that went: “Jim, nice answering machine you got there, give me a call, it’s Sylvester Stallone.” So I thought, yeah, right, c’mon. Stallone would have a handler or an agent…it’s not every day you get a message from Stallone. So I thought somebody was pranking me. I called my buddy Sal who did an imitation of him: “Come on, don’t do this to me.” He’s like “Do what?” So I called him back and Stallone answers, “Yo.” And I said, “Is this Sylvester Stallone?” And he goes [affects Stallone voice], “Yeah, call me Sly.” So I go, “Hi Sly, how you doing?” And he goes, “Yeah, I like the sound of your band. I want that sound for my new movie, can you help me out?” And I said, “Is the pope Catholic?” I knew this was the chance of a lifetime.
He sent us a rough cut of the movie, the first three and a half minutes of a montage. So me and [Survivor guitarist] Frankie Sullivan just watch this thing, and he’s got a Les Paul and starts playing the “chugga, chugga, chugga” thing. I see the punches, you know, Mr. T knocking the daylights out of Stallone, and I go “bom…bom bom bom.” Literally syncing the guitar part to the punches we see onscreen. So we had a really good start, and then we begged Stallone to send us the whole movie, which he finally did the next day. Begrudgingly, because he wasn’t supposed to. But that’s when everything took shape, because that’s when we see Burgess Meredith‘s character going “Roc, you’re losing the eye of the tiger!” And we go, “There’s our song.”
The Peterik interview is a good one. His first hit was Vehicle which he wrote for Ides of March. The song appears in Sly’s movie Lock Up. Check out the full interview here.
- Houston Press: Jim Peterik…
Rocky 1 -5 Makes the List
Rocky and Adrian by Aykut Aydoğdu.
On October 24, 2014, SciFighting posted the Top Ten Most Memorable Boxing Movies by Marcus Hogan. Rocky [II, III, IV and V] came in at #1. What? Rocky Balboa didn’t make it?
Here’s what they had to say…
1.) Rocky (II, III, IV, V)
Rocky was the highest-grossing film in 1976, making $225 million worldwide on a $1 million budget. The film was shot in only 28 days, but won 3 Oscars including Best Picture. It is the rags to riches story of Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) who is a loan shark by day and boxer by night. Although this film is not considered non-fiction, former heavyweight boxer Charles “Chuck” Wepner claims that this and all the proceeding Rocky films where based on his life.
Rocky and Four Other Celebrity Statues
On September 30, 2014, Rep-Am.com posted 5 Celebrity Statues. You can guess which was listed first. Sylvester Stallone and Thomas Schomberg created an icon! – Craig
“Rocky” “Rocky II” and “Rocky III” Limited Ed Mondo Prints
These are three limited edition posters that Mondo released at the Alamo Draft House in July in celebration of Sly’s birthday. The posters were then offered to the general public in August.
The Rocky poster was created by Cesar Moreno. 24″x36″ screen print. Hand numbered. Edition of 150. $45
The Rocky II poster by Matt Taylor. 18″x24″ screen print. Hand numbered. Edition of 150. $40.
The Rocky III poster by Matt Taylor. 20″x36″ screen print. Hand numbered. Edition of 150. $40.
For more details on the posters and to see slightly larger version click over to The Fire Wire.
The 12 Craziest Character Names Created by Sylvester Stallone
On July 6, 2014, Entertainment Tonight recognized Sly’s birthday and posted The 12 Craziest Character Names Created by Sylvester Stallone.
The 12 Greatest Sports Movie Songs of All-Time
Sports Illustrated recently posted Dan Treadway’s choices for The 12 Greatest Sports Movie Songs of All-Time. Sly had two songs make the cut and here is what Mr. Treadway had to say about them…
Rocky: Gonna Fly Now
The most difficult part of making a list like this was determining how many songs from the Rocky franchise to include. Montages are a fairly critical aspect of more or less every sports film, and Sly Stallone’s movies more or less wrote the book on them. So I would be remiss if I did not at least include the most montagiest of montage songs “Gonna Fly Now.” I honestly can’t listen to any part of this song without imagining Rocky jogging around war-torn ’70s Philly in sweats and a beanie. This song was nominated for an Academy Award in 1977 and — despite Rocky getting the nod for Best Picture and Best Director — it somehow didn’t win. Instead the honors went to the theme from A Star is Born, which I’m pretty sure is the song that’s been playing at my dentist’s office for the past 24 years:
Rocky III: Eye of the Tiger
Believe it or not, we were extremely close to living in an “Eye of the Tiger”-less world. The horror.
Jim Peterick, the guitarist for Survivor, told the story of the song’s origin during an interview with Guitar World:
I came home from shopping one day and heard a message on the answering machine from Sylvester Stallone. At first, I thought it was a joke, but I called the number and sure enough, Stallone answered. He told me that he loved the band and had heard “Poor Man’s Son” and “Take You On A Saturday” from our Premonition album and wanted that same kind of “street” sound for his new movie,Rocky III. He sent us a video montage of the movie and Frankie (Sullivan) and I watched it together. There were scenes of Rocky getting a little “soft” (doing the Visa card commercials) and Mr. T “rising up” with his Mohawk. It was electric. The temp music they used to accompany the montage was “Another One Bites The Dust” by Queen. I remember asking Stallone why he just didn’t use that song for the movie and he said it was because they couldn’t get the publishing rights for it. At that point I just said, “Thank you, Queen!”
We’ve now reached the point where I don’t even know what I think about “Eye of the Tiger.” It’s been used so many times, in so many capacities, that it’s much more than just the lead song from a movie soundtrack — it’s pretty much its own emotion. It’s the musical version of chugging Red Bull while sprinting after a gazelle that you plan on killing with your bare hands.
The Greatest Movie Anthems of the 80’s
On June 20, 2014, Kevin Polowy of Yahoo! Movies posted The Greatest Movie Anthems of the 80’s. Sly had two songs that made the cut…
1. Survivor, “Eye of the Tiger” (Rocky III, 1983)
For the third Rocky film — a.k.a. “the one with Mr. T and Hulk Hogan” —Sylvester Stallone commissioned Survivor to write and record “Eye of the Tiger” after failing to get the rights to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” Training rooms haven’t been the same since.
9. Robert Tepper, “No Easy Way Out” (Rocky IV, 1985)
Sly strikes again. Like Footloose, Rocky IV was another all-around formidable soundtrack, with tunes like Survivor’s “Burning Heart” and James Brown’s “Living in America.” But the song that instantly takes us back in time is Tepper’s gun-ho anthem, which set up Rock’s climactic bout with Ivan Drago.
Rocky and Rambo PodCasts
Earlier this week, I received the following e-mail:
Hi Mr. Zablo,I’m Mat Bradley-Tschirgi, Producer of the Sequelcast, a podcast looking at movie franchises. I’d thought you and your StalloneZone readers would be interested in checking out the podcasts we did of the Rocky films this past month. We also covered the Rambo films a few years ago. The podcasts might contain brief moments of explicit language.Here are the links:ROCKY III (Guest Paul Goebel of Beat The Geeks): http://traffic.libsyn.com/sequelcast/sequelcast170.mp3ROCKY IV (Guest Eric Lichtenfeld of The Ultimate Stallone Reader): http://traffic.libsyn.com/sequelcast/sequelcast171.mp3ROCKY V (Guest Ryan Hoss of the Super Mario Bros. The Movie Archive): http://traffic.libsyn.com/sequelcast/sequelcast172.mp3ROCKY BALBOA (Guest West Anthony of The Auteurcast): http://traffic.libsyn.com/sequelcast/sequelcast173.mp3FIRST BLOOD (Guest David Morrell [author of the original First Blood novel]): http://traffic.libsyn.com/sequelcast/sequelcast31.mp3RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II: http://traffic.libsyn.com/sequelcast/sequelcast32.mp3RAMBO (Guest Eric Lichtenfeld [author of Action Speaks Louder]): http://traffic.libsyn.com/sequelcast/sequelcast34.mp3Keep up the good work with StalloneZone. The Expendables 3 looks to have a mightier cast than the second. I’m just wondering where Barney’s goatee went in all the promo shots for the film.Thanks,Mat Bradley-Tschirgi
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Thanks Mat for the kind words and the links to the Stallone-related podcasts! – Craig
Crowining Mr. Sports Movies
On April 9, 2014, Yahoo! Movies took a look at which actor had played the most sports roles in their piece Crowining Mr. Sports Movies by Brian Enk.
Had they counted each Rocky movie individually (as I think they should have) then Sly would have easily come in first. At any rate, here’s what the said about him…
—Sylvester Stallone: If we were to tally sports movies as a whole, including sequels, the Italian Stallion would be our champ, with six entries as boxer Rocky Balboa in the “Rocky” movies. Sly’s other sports movie credits include “Death Race 2000” (1975), in which he played deadly cross country racer Machine Gun Joe Viterbo; “Paradise Alley” (1978), in which he played Cosmo Corboni, one of three brothers trying to play the wrestling game in 1940s NYC; “Victory” (1981), in which he played a soccer goalie for the Allied forces as they face off against a German team at a WWII prison camp; “Over the Top” (1986), the greatest arm-wrestling movie ever made; “Driven” (2001), in which he plays former CART champion and car racing mentor Joe Tanto; and “Grudge Match” (2013), in which he plays former boxing champ Henry “Razor” Sharp.