Philly’s Rocky statue gets the podcast treatment

Creed III, the latest sequel in the series of spinoffs to Rocky that feature Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan), the son of original Rocky opponent Apollo Creed, was released last week.

While Creed III is true to the structure of most of the previous movies in the series, the new film is missing some of the things that we’re used to seeing. And that starts with Rocky himself — Sylvester Stallone is not in Creed III. The movie is set mostly in Los Angeles, which means no Rocky steps and no Rocky statue.

» READ MORE: ‘Creed III’ isn’t a knockout, but it can take a punch. Michael B. Jordan makes an impressive directorial debut.

But thanks to The Statue, a six-part podcast produced by the Monument Lab and WHYY, we have a whole series dedicated to the Rocky statue and its relationship to Philadelphia. The podcast is hosted by Monument Lab director and cofounder Paul Farber, and produced by Michael Olcott and Michaela Winberg.

Farber cofounded Monument Lab, which he describes as a “public art and history studio,” in 2012, in order to research monuments and consider their future. A few years ago when he was teaching a class about Philadelphia history at Penn, Farber’s mother, a retired Temple professor, asked if he would be including Rocky.

“I decided to dig into it. Every day of the year, no matter the weather, no matter the time of day, during the pandemic even, there was a line at the Rocky statue, people waiting to take a photo,” Farber said to The Inquirer.

About 4 million people visit the Rocky statue in a year. “Those are Statue of Liberty numbers,” said Farber. “And I wanted to understand the monument landscape, as we know it.”

Over the course of six episodes, The Statue — which uses a remixed version of the famous Bill Conti musical score from the Rocky films as its theme — approaches its subject from many sides. Farber interviewed the sculptor, A. Thomas Schomberg, who was commissioned in 1980 by Stallone to build the statue, which was then used as a prop in Rocky III.

In 1982′s Rocky III, Rocky Balboa retires from boxing and the statue is unveiled at the Art Museum, as part of an elaborate ceremony interrupted by Clubber Lang (Mr. T).

Listeners of the podcast also hear from Haseeb Payab, the Afghan refugee profiled by The Inquirer last year who chose to settle in Philadelphia, in part, because he had seen and enjoyed the Rocky movies.

The series covers the decades-old debate over whether the statue belongs at the Art Museum, or near the sports stadiums. We learn about the racial implications of having a statue of the fictional Rocky, while Philly native Joe Frazier, the real-world heavyweight champion from the same time period, was without a statue in Philadelphia until 2015, four years after his death. Rocky plays into the “Great White Hope” myth, the fantasy a lot of white people had in the 1970s that one of their own would come out of nowhere and beat Muhammad Ali.

“The first I taught Rocky … I taught Rocky I and Creed I,” said Farber, who at the time of the interview had not seen the new film. “And it was this really interesting back and forth for my students, who were able to understand that the original Rocky was a story about race, gender, and class dynamics in the city … and with Creed, they saw that play out over time.”

Did working on the podcast teach Farber something he didn’t know?

“One is that this connection between Rocky and the city of Philadelphia continues to reverberate,” Farber said. “I understood that Rocky was the most famous Philadelphian that never lived … he is almost like an honorary resident.”

And while Rocky means a lot to a great many people, both the podcast and Creed movies show that there’s also room for other monuments, and other heroes.

“For many, this individual is worth celebrating,” Farber says of Rocky, in the last episode. “We can imagine a future in public art where we don’t neglect the many for the few.”