YMMV / Rocky III

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Sure, Clubber Lang is brash, crude, and hostile. And those are his good traits. And he's utterly ruthless, damn near animalistic in the ring. But is he really all that different from Rocky? They're both athletes who came up from a rough upbringing, surviving by sheer grit and determination, and scratched and scraped out of the gutter to earn a shot a greatness. So why exactly is Clubber the villain here?
  • Did Apollo train Rocky out of respect and admiration for him, or was it to get back at Clubber Lang, who threatened him before their first fight?
  • Apollo also might have done it so that Rocky would owe him that favor...
• Awesome Music: Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" makes its glorious debut over the opening credits.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Paulie's commentary on the folks in Apollo's old gym are so bluntly racist that they can elicit stunned laughter from viewers. On the other hand, one might view it differently.
• Evil Is Cool: Clubber Lang is a well-regarded antagonist. His Trash Talk is quite memorable, and he's the first character to KO Rocky. And he's also played by Mr. T.
• Franchise Original Sin: Started a lot of the things that'd be derided in IV; a main character gets killed off for little reason, the antagonist is a lot less well-written than Apollo, several moments are flat-out silly, and Rocky's victory over Lang doesn't feel very plausible. It's just that most of these moments weren't as bad, Lang was still a more well-rounded character in comparison with the overtly-villainous Ivan Drago, and III had Apollo's Character Development to anchor it.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Mickey dies of a heart attack in this third installment of the Rocky franchise. In Creed III, Mary-Anne would later die of a stroke.
  • Apollo and Paulie have a heated argument (and nearly come to blows) over Paulie's derisive (and mildly racist) opinions of Apollo's old gym. Rocky tries to play peacemaker and tells Creed "It takes about six years to get to know [Paulie]", to which Apollo angrily retorts "I ain't got six years!" This statement would sadly prove prophetic, as Creed would die in the ring at the hands of Ivan Drago in the next film, set a mere two years later.
• He Really Can Act: Mr. T shows some surprisingly understated moments as Clubber Lang, particularly when he quietly makes his "prediction": "Pain...."
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Not so much for the film itself, but Weird Al's "Eye of the Tiger" parody "Rye or the Kaiser", about a former boxing champ opening a restaurant becomes this when you watch Rocky Balboa.
  • After completing production, Sly said in an interview "But there'll never be a Rocky IV. You gotta call a halt."
  • The MAD magazine parody had Rocky commenting that because his opponents had big chests, he wanted his next match to be with Dolly Parton. Stallone would star alongside Parton two years later in Rhinestone.
  • Check out the Rocky XXXVIII poster in Airplane II: The Sequel.
• Ho Yay: Rocky and Apollo in the ocean at the end of the training montage. You'd swear they were trying to invoke this.
• It Was His Sled: Mickey dies.
• Narm Charm: Rocky's Inelegant Blubbering when Mickey dies should ruin the moment, but it's such a Tear Jerker that most viewers are willing to cut poor Rocky some slack for it.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Hulk Hogan played a Heel in this movie because he WAS a Heel at the time of filming (before he was famous). Of course, his Face–Heel Turn in wrestling came after becoming famous as an All-American Face.
  • Many people now would see Clubber Lang as an analogue of Mike Tyson, (trash talking fighter from the streets with devastating punching power, a bad attitude, not a lot of height but a ton of mass, and a tendency to destroy his opponents in the early rounds) but the film came out in 1982, and Mike Tyson didn't first start fighting professionally until 1985. Lang was actually an analog of a young George Foreman ^note Before Foreman found God and reinvented as a jolly fat grandpa who would poke fun at himself and Sonny Liston ^note Liston was basically the proto-Foreman and had a reputation as a fearsome, intimidating boxer; he even had Foreman as a sparring partner for a brief while..
• One-Scene Wonder: Hulk Hogan as Thunderlips has no importance for the plot, but puts up such a good showing (and a good fight) that it became one of the most memorable scenes in the franchise.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Both Sylvester Stallone and Survivor keyboardist Jim Peterik have admitted that "Eye of the Tiger" was written to sound like Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" (which itself is inspired by "Good Times" by Chic) because Stallone couldn't get the rights to the Queen song.
• Values Dissonance: As stated above, Paulie's commentary on the black boxers at Apollo's old gym (dismissing the music played in the gym as "jungle junk", remarking that he, Adrian and Rocky better leave before the boxers in the gym "leave us for dead!", and dismissing Apollo's panache-laden training by remarking that Rocky "ain't a colored fighter!") are so bluntly racist that it can make a modern viewer quite uncomfortable. For what it's worth, Rocky does (in his typically subtle, nice guy way) call him on it. In general it is clearly showing that Paulie is out of line for his racist comments. The bottom quote also shows how he is being a hypocrite:
  Paulie: I got a reputation. I don't like these people!
  Rocky: You don't like 'em? Well maybe they don't like you either, Paulie.
  Paulie: What'd I do to them?

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