THE FRIDAY FIVE: TOP FIVE MOVIE TRAINING MONTAGES
It’s Friday! Time to once again countdown in the world of nerd with The Friday Five! This week, the top five movie training montages!
We live in a fast paced society. As much as we all wish that some movies would last forever, we don’t always get what we want. Enter, the montage. When we need to show our heroes learning how to do something and we either don’t have the time or budget to show it, the montage is here to help. Usually accompanied by amazing and inspiring music, only a montage can make you believe that someone has learned a lifetime of knowledge in a 2:55 second span.
5) Jean Claude Van Damme is Bloodsport
Sometimes, you really need to win an illegal underground Kumite tournament, but you just aren’t good enough. What can you do? You can’t just run away or lose the fight. No, you need to get with a true fighting master and learn many different martial arts in the span of minutes. Other methods involve serving food blindfolded, catching fish with your hands and being pulled between trees on ropes. Bloodsport is an action movie CLASSIC and if you haven’t seen it, I suggest you do and then add in 10 reps of fish catching to your gym routine.
4) No Retreat, No Surrender
Bloodsport covers what to do if you ARE Jean Claude Van Damme, but what if you have to fight him? What if your dad is on the run from a Russian martial arts syndicate and you just aren’t good enough to fight back? Well, OBVIOUSLY you have your Bruce Lee poster come to life in the form of someone who looks like Bruce Lee if I wasn’t wearing my contacts and learn! Much like Bloodsport, No Retreat, No Surrender is another classic of the video store. Where else do you get sit ups on basketball hoops and strange homoerotic ice cream eating friends in the same montage? This also placed higher than Bloodsport due to the incredible song playing.
3) The Monster Squad
The average kid today couldn’t handle a film like Monster Squad. The average kid can’t even conceptualize a film like Monster Squad. A far cry from the straight trash of the Alvin and the Chipmunks Trilogy, Monster Squad is about a group of kids fighting monsters (duh) in their town while swearing, smoking, and calling each other a bad word that rhymes with hag. AN ABSOLUTE CLASSIC and one of my top ten movies of all time, this film which is clearly superior to Goonies in every way features this great montage. Set to the song Rock till You Drop (which rules and appears to be about rocking so hard you cannot stand up), the squad basically lets cool kid Rudy do everything while they write misspelled letters, make business cards and play dress up with Frankenstein. When you watch this and see Rudy making wooden stakes and silver bullets, you know shit is about to get real on the monsters ass.
2) Breakin’
My friends and I need a third member of our dance crew and we happen to know this girl who’s a ballet dancer with racist parents. She’s CLEARLY the best choice in this classic scene from the amazing movie Breakin’. As part of the N’ Saga with Breakin’ 2, Rappin’, and Thrashin’ , Breakin’ set the standard for teaching someone high level “street dancing” through the power of moving your hands around theirs and getting a thumbs up from your friend. Another of my favorite movies EVER, Breakin’ shows us that even if you know nothing about what people do, you can learn in minutes to be a popping and locking master.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXuNa_h804c
1)Rocky IV
Was there ever a doubt? You knew what was number one before you clicked on the page. THE greatest montage ever. Not just of training, but in the history of film. Rocky has to defeat the evil Russian but he’s not strong enough. He trains in a barn using rocks and by running up a freaking mountain while the fantastic song Hearts on Fire plays while contractually obligated to appear Adrian looks on. This is without a doubt better than training in an actual gym like Drago. Then when he crumples that picture of Drago, you know that the Soviet Union is over. Literally, I think the awesomeness of this montage caused them to collapse. Finally we top it off on the mountain yelling “DRAGOOOOOO”. I want to celebrate all my best moments in life that way, running up mountains and yelling.
And that will do it for this week Friday Five! Don’t forget to send us feedback in the comments, on social media or at sowizardpodcast@yahoo.com!
As always, keep circulating the tapes and we will see you right back here next week for another countdown in the world of nerd with The Friday Five!!
