The Statue podcast thrills listeners with the legend of Philadelphia’s Rocky Balboa bronze sculpture

Everybody loves a good underdog story and few underdog stories continue to exert the kind of cultural influence enjoyed by Rocky. Directed by John G. Avildsen, Sylvester Stallone’s boxing film, where he plays Italian-American fighter Rocky Balboa, has won the hearts of countless fans across the globe. An excellent new podcast, Paul Farber’s The Statue, explores the enduring popularity of the movie, centred around one artefact — the titular Rocky statue at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The pose struck by Stallone in this statue is of Rocky Balboa holding his arms aloft in triumph, the culmination of one of the film’s defining sequences — the training montage of Rocky Balboa in the morning, as he runs up the 72 steps that lead to the top of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Growing up in Philadelphia as a queer, Jewish boy, Farber soon learned that Rocky Balboa isn’t simply a fictional character for the locals who love the statue and visit it frequently.