“ROCKY BALBOA” TRIVIA

Stallone underwent six months of intense training to get in shape for this role.

Antonio Tarver (the real light heavyweight champion at the time of production) trained for 5 weeks prior to the film and had to put on 25 pounds.

Rocky’s two pet turtles, Cuff and Link, are actually the original two animal actors who appeared in Rocky, some 30 years previously.

The actor and real-life boxer who portrayed Spider Rico in the original Rocky reprises his role here, as Rocky’s buddy and kitchen help in Adrian’s Restaurant.

Actor Don Sherman who portrayed Andy the bartender from Rocky (1976), Rocky III (1982) and Rocky V (1990) can briefly be seen in this film sitting in a wheelchair in the background of his bar cheering on Rocky during the fight. Andy originally had a more sizable role, but the scene was cut from the finished film.

Stallone based the idea of Rocky owning a restaurant and spending his time telling old fight stories on former world heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey.

The computer simulation fight was based on the 1970 Super Fight which pitted Muhammad Ali against Rocky Marciano. Every possible scenario was considered and filmed and the computer decided that Marciano would win in the 13th round. When told of the result, Ali retorted “that computer was made in Alabama”.

According to Stallone, Carl Weathers refused to grant the production permission to use archive footage of him. The brief clip of the fight between Rocky and Apollo was recreated using a body double.

Sly was actually knocked unconscious while filming the final fight scene with Antonio Tarver.

After the release of the film, critics hailed the fighting scenes as the most realistic in the entire Rocky saga. On the DVD, Sly hypothesizes that a major factor in this realism was that he used realistic sound-effects for punches. When a punch lands in the film, the sound used was a real punch, whereas in previous films, sounds used for punches had included shotgun blasts, broken bottles, chains and baseball bats hitting wet leather.

Adrian passed away on January 11, 2002, according to her gravestone (which is still sitting in that Philly cemetery!)

According to Sly, the shot of Rocky standing alone on the museum steps just before the end credits was actually filmed without knowledge.