Apollo Creed has a problem. In his first proper scene during the seminal 1976 sports classic, Rocky, Sylvester Stallone’s budding antagonist is introduced not as a villain or, necessarily, a fair-minded athletic rival. He’s a businessman sweating bullets because his upcoming New Year’s Day fight on the year of America’s bicentennial just imploded. The man he was supposed to fight has an injury, and there’s no time left to field a credible challenger. So he comes up with an idea; an innovation; a fine example of American entrepreneurship.“This is the land of opportunity, right?” Apollo, a Black man living barely a decade removed from the Voting Rights Act, almost incredulously asks. “So Apollo Creed, on Jan. 1, gives a local underdog fighter an opportunity. A Snow White underdog whose face I’m going to put on this poster with me, and I’ll tell you why. Because I’m sentimental. A lot of other people in this country are just as sentimental, and there’s nothing better they’d like to see than Apollo Creed give a local Philadelphia boy a title shot on this country’s biggest birthday.”cnx.cmd.push(function() {cnx({playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530",}).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796");});There is a lot to unpack in this brief and flashy introduction to a character whom actor Carl Weathers turned into an unlikely icon. Not so subtly based on real-life heavyweight champ and legend Muhammad Ali, Apollo is depicted by Stallone’s screenplay as a showboat and a showman, a guy who literally comes to Philly at the beginning of America’s bicentennial riding a pony and dressed as George Washington. The movie suggests one should view Apollo’s sudden patriotic fervor a bit askance. Yet he seems to genuinely value the type of inspiration a once-broke Stallone also was betting on when he insisted any producer cast him as the lead of his script. Hence, perhaps, why Apollo even ends the aforementioned scene by dismissing a compliment about his vision being very American. “No, Jergens,” he counters, “it’s very smart.”It’s also very much in dialogue with its cultural moment, onscreen and off. Then and now, Rocky is truly sentimental, if in a slightly sneaky, downbeat, ‘70s Hollywood fashion. So much so, it wowed audiences and critics to the point where folks were on their feet and cheering the feel-good ending—an ending where Apollo beat Rocky, for the record. But even the hero losing the fight while going the distance in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, and post-1970s cinema cynicism felt like a Cinderella story in ‘76, to the point where it won the Best Picture Oscar. In other words, it felt American.And during that era of America’s previous major 50-year milestone, it was also part and parcel of a pop culture that engaged both with the ideals and myths of America, ever struggling to reconcile the sometimes yawning gap between the two.1976 was, indeed, a year of contrasts and deliberation about what it means to be an American, and perhaps more acutely, a good American. While Rocky won Best Picture, one of the many better nominated rivals was All the President’s Men, director Alan J. Pakula and screenwriter William Goldman’s procedural celebration of the journalists who brought down President Richard Nixon not even three years prior to the film’s release. Overly romantic about the role of journalists and the fourth estate in society? Absolutely. But it was nonetheless a breathless, hushed study of a country on the edge of corruption, and as much as warning as valedictory speech that patted Woodward and Bernstein on the back for catching a crook.In some ways, Rocky and All the President’s Men stood on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but both were engaged with a moment in America that despite having all the reason in the world to be as skeptical as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman’s muckrakers were onscreen, was a country more concerned with either protecting or salvaging American principles. That’s a stark difference from the current impulse to, generally, seek to be distracted from them.The 200th anniversary, by contrast, was the year of the tall ships in New York Harbor on the Fourth of July, a literal “Freedom Train” museum scooting coast to coast on American rails, and even the British Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom” hitting number one on the Billboard’s Top 100 charts. It also was part and parcel at a time when American art, both pop culture and counterculture, were excited to engage in an internal debate.Seven years prior to the bicentennial, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider fairly overtly, if despairingly, critiqued the idea of American freedom when a biker going by the name of Captain America (Fonda) is gunned down by good ol’ boys after cryptically musing “we blew it.” That was one vision of an America torn apart by Vietnam, assassinations, and the struggle to end a century of Jim Crow in the segregated South.Other films took a more measured, but still relatively sharp-eyed accounting of the moment. Arriving both a few years early and in response to the bicentennial was 1776 (1972), the big screen adaptation of Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone’s Broadway musical about the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. Comparatively rose-tinted when contrasted with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton 40-ish years later, 1776 was still revelatory for a country that had the popular image of the founding generation of Americans calcified in marble.William Daniels’ John Adams exasperated and exhausted, even with intended affection, Howard da Silva’s Benjamin Franklin charmed but also vacillated when the question of slavery arose, and Ken Howard’s Thomas Jefferson… probably got more of a pass for his hypocrisies than the real author of the Declaration deserved. Nonetheless, all three and their rivals, from the slave-defending Southern caucus to the royalist-sympathetic members of the Pennsylvania delegation, offered a rousing and intentionally messy portrait of American independence. Which makes Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson’s jovial, high-kicking wins all the more giddy.Yet the comparison to Miranda’s Hamilton proves apropos since, with the exception of the occasional Ken Burns documentary on PBS, it feels like pop culture has generally evaded debates of patriotism, liberty, and even America itself in the 11 years since Miranda’s musical took Broadway by storm—and then received a brief resurgence during the pandemic when a taped version of Hamilton was released on Disney+.Otherwise most of pop culture has favored evading the American experiment rather than risk alienating a catastrophically divided audience by considering what it might mean on America’s 250th. There are technically a few independent films and TV series released by companies like Angel Studios that nominally tread these waters, but they by and large arrive with the type of hagiographic hokum that even 1776 rolled its eyes at more than 50 years ago. Meanwhile the major studios only want to confront questions of patriotism if there’s a guy holding a Captain America shield—the Marvel one, not Fonda’s.Given the acrimony and general decline of American democracy in the last decade, I understand the sentiment of choosing to just recoil from the debate or even the holiday. But in a certain sense, that surrenders it to the folks who would stamp America’s 250th with bloodsport and racist rants on the White House lawn, and the gilded excesses of old King George on the Oval Office walls.An inability to debate, fight for, or even acknowledge the question of America, even in our shared fantasies, is to let an experiment fall evermore into disarray.The post America 250 vs. How Hollywood Addressed the Country’s Last Landmark Birthday appeared first on Den of Geek.