The Statue podcast thrills listeners with the legend of Philadelphia’s 10ft Rocky Balboa bronze sculpture

The statue draws an estimated four million visitors every year, and has become a cultural icon

Everybody loves a good underdog story and few underdog stories continue to exert the kind of cultural influence enjoyed by  Rocky (1976). 

Directed by John G. Avildsen (who also made  The Karate Kid, the other iconic underdog story of the 80s), 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 (the first episode now available on Apple Podcasts and the NPR website), explores the enduring popularity of the movie, centred around one artefact — the titular Rocky statue at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

This 10-foot bronze statue draws an estimated four million visitors every year, over twice the annual footfall at the symbolic Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, for instance. 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. 

Farber, director of Monument Labs, and the writer-narrator of this podcast, has studied monuments and their cultural/ historical significance his whole life. He uses that experience, as well as an impressively diverse range of interviews with fans and experts alike, to paint a holistic picture of the craze around this statue.

How does a monument become a living, breathing, constantly abuzz part of a community? Where exactly does pop culture insinuate itself into hyperlocal cultures, and what do these moments of ‘convergence’ tell us about ourselves? These are some of the questions explored in the first episode, which dropped on January 10.

Farber begins the podcast on an atypical note: by interviewing his mother, the person who changed his “huffy and snobby” opinion about the statue. 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. He is a symbol of hope and resilience, and with the times getting tougher, Rocky Balboa becomes more and more relevant. It helps, of course, that the boxing ring is a super-convenient metaphor for people from all walks of life to project their hopes and insecurities on to.