'Rocky Run' maintains popularity

Scores of tourists still copycat the iconic run.
PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- With a wide smile and unabashed enthusiasm, Annie Rodriguez climbed the 72nd step, thrust her hands skyward and jumped up and down.
The only thing missing was the "Rocky" theme song.
The 38-year-old from Quebradillas, Puerto Rico, hadn't seen the movie in years, but while visiting the city recently she brought her family to the Philadelphia Art Museum for the "Rocky Run."
"You gotta do it. It's a must," she said after her re-enactment. "I was explaining to my mother-in-law that this was the place, that after Rocky was running for so long, he ran up. You get the feeling of 'I did it. I made it.'"
Rodriguez's husband agreed: "Si, si, you feel like him. You feel like him in the movie," Oscar Barreto said.
Decades after the 1976 debut of "Rocky," scores of tourists daily still seek out the Art Museum steps to emulate its iconic run. Film experts say the run represents a triumphal moment, and is an attraction likely to remain popular.
"Everybody wants to see it. We get calls from all over," said Shirley Blum of the city's Independence Visitor Center. "The other day I was on the main floor and a couple from Korea, all they wanted to see was the Rocky steps. It's very popular."
In the first movie, an out-of-shape Rocky, played by Sylvester Stallone, first runs up the steps in a gloomy pre-dawn light. At the top, he's exhausted, gasping for breath. But in his next session he bounds up the steps. As the Rocky theme (the song, "Gonna Fly Now") trumpets in the background, he reaches the top, thrusts his white-taped hands skyward and jogs in place, gazing triumphantly over a sunrise-orange Philadelphia skyline.
On a typical summer day, only a few moments pass between copycat runs made by lone tourists, families with kids, and even entire tour buses.
In a span of five minutes on a recent evening, three 8-year-old boys struck the Rocky pose (and threw in an extra couple flexes). Then came the Rodriguez family. Then a father showed his son the two bronze shoeprints and the word Rocky stamped into the ground.
Susan Ohmer, a Notre Dame professor of film and American studies, said research has shown people in movie settings are moved to re-enact scenes. She said Notre Dame visitors seek out spots from the movie "Rudy," though there is no iconic scene easy to emulate.
Like Rudy, Ohmer noted, Rocky was an uplifting character.
"He sets himself a goal, he says, 'I'm going to do it,"' she said. "And when he's charging up those steps that's a moment of triumph, and I think people want to do it."
Other film scenes that are re-enacted include the Empire State Building scene in "Sleepless in Seattle" and the lake-rowing scene in "When Harry Met Sally," said Josh Stenger, assistant professor of film studies and English at Wheaton College.
"So much of the film world is not recognizable as a real space, so when we can go to that space and see what Rocky saw ... it gives us a unique opportunity to be in that space, whereas we can't go to Oz," Stenger said.
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