Whether it\u2019s Oliver Stone setting a scene from Platoon to Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber, or Quentin Tarantino setting a scene from Reservoir Dogs to \u201cStuck In The Middle\u201d by Stealer\u2019s Wheel, filmmakers often depend upon certain passages of music to produce specific emotional reactions in their audiences. And actor\/director Sylvester Stallone is no exception: His Rocky franchise produced its second #1 pop hit on this day in 1982 when Survivor\u2019s \u201cEye Of The Tiger\u201d began a six-week run atop the Billboard pop chart.<\/p>\n
The first #1 hit from Stallone\u2019s boxing series was \u201cGonna Fly Now (Theme from Rocky),\u201d which topped the charts in the summer of 1977, with a very different tone than the hard-charging \u201cEye Of The Tiger.\u201d Like the films\u2019 main character, who transformed himself from a lovable, if bumbling palooka in the first Rocky into a vengeful, muscle-bound warrior in Rocky III, \u201cEye Of The Tiger\u201d eschewed subtlety in favor of brute force. But as brute-force pop songs go, few have been more effective than the one-and-only #1 hit from the Chicago bar-band Survivor.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Survivor was hand-picked by Sylvester Stallone to write a song for the second Rocky sequel after he heard their minor 1981 hit \u201cPoor Man\u2019s Son,\u201d a mid-tempo number in the vein of Foreigner or .38 Special. For the Rocky III soundtrack, Stallone told songwriting band members Frankie Sullivan and Jim Peterik that he wanted \u201csomething with a strong beat\u2026that would appeal to the rock crowd.\u201d What he got was one of the most effective and popular soundtrack hits of all time as \u201cEye Of The Tiger\u201d raced to #1 on the pop charts and remained there for six consecutive weeks\u2014five weeks longer than the theme song for the original Rocky.<\/p>\n
As for Survivor, they turned out a respectable run of six more top-40 hits over the subsequent four years, including the #2 hit \u201cBurning Heart\u201d (1985) from the Rocky IV soundtrack.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Whether it\u2019s Oliver Stone setting a scene from Platoon to Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber, or Quentin Tarantino setting a scene from Reservoir Dogs to \u201cStuck In The Middle\u201d by Stealer\u2019s Wheel, filmmakers often depend upon certain passages of music to produce specific emotional reactions in their audiences. And actor\/director Sylvester Stallone is no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9919\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}