I was checking out a fitness site recently and they had embedded the training montage from "Rocky IV." Now, I'm not a great judge of these things, but I've probably seen "Rocky IV" 17 times in its entirety, though now, with the advent of YouTube, I've watched the training montage a good 50 times or so: a few more times through than the sappy-but-still-moving "Rocky Qua Pied Piper" montage from "Rocky II," but not as many as "Rocky-becomes-Ali" montage from "Rocky III," which climaxes with Stallone and Carl Weathers frolicking in the surf, filmed in an era before the term "homoerotic" had entered common parlance.  In that one, the Rock doesn't just get in the shape of  his life,  but he becomes smooth, quick, almost cool--like like Ali--and gains the respect of the real Ali-foil of the series, Apollo "What's-the-MATTER-wit-you??" Creed.  

The "Rocky IV" presages the current rage--of which I fully approve--of dropping all the machines and tech and going with bare-bones equipment and functional movements.  In the Rocky IV sequence, Rocko chops down trees, hoists carts containing his training partners and coaches, even harnesses himself to a sled, gets down on all fours, and pulls his brother-in-law across the plains of frozen Siberia.  Meanwhile, his adversary, the seemingly-genetically-engineered Drago, works out in air-conditioned comfort as teams of scientists monitor his vital signs and nod at one another approvingly at their creation. 

At the end, though, Rocky falls in love with the Russian people watching his fight, who, improbably, start cheering for him rather than their hometown hero, whilst Drago essentially renounces his whole country, screaming "I FIGHT FOR ME!  FOR ME!!"  much to everyone's horror.  Rocky has learned to love and trust the commies, and is the better man for it, while Drago has learned a thing or two about Western individuality.  But it's not his fault--at heart, he's just a genetically-engineered pug.

The ROCKY movies are really just a framework for those training montage sequences, which, it must be said, work like a charm.  They're inspiring, they're gritty, they show you what's possible through effort.  I remember I used to run with a tape-deck Walkman (those are what we used to have  before IPods, youngster) with a cassette tape (those are what we used to have before MP3's, junior) on which I had recorded, from a VCR tape (those are...ah, never mind.  Just keep my wheelchair well-oiled), the theme songs played underneath those training montages.

Having been a fan of training montages for a few decades, though, this one still cracks me up: