The Rocky films are great aren’t they? They started off as a gritty fictional document of a rising boxing star, closing with a film that showed Rocky Balboa resembling a relaxed, tanned phallus that has been dipped in a particularly aggressive wasp nest.

And while you think that Rocky was out for the count (or, It Really Should’ve Thrown The Towel In At Rocky IV Because It Was Ace), you’d be massively wrong.

That’s because Rocky is climbing up the ropes again in slow motion, this time with another hugely stupid idea which sounds like the work of a satirist. Ladies and gentlemen, in the blue corner we have decency which is already weeping… and his opponent, in the red corner, Rocky: The Broadway Musical!

That’s right. You are not dreaming that last sentence. A team of berks, comprising of Tony Award-winning songwriters Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, alongside Thomas Meehan who has been involved with Hairspray, Annie and The Producers, are working on a musical adaptation of a bunch of films that star a central character who talks like he’s deaf.

The show is set to hit Broadway by 2013.

Better yet is that Sylvester Stallone is throwing his oar in, attending a private reading of the show which was held in New York recently.

Meehan says:

“At first I thought, all the world needs is a ‘Rocky’ musical. But then I looked at the film. I thought it had beautiful construction and such high emotion, and it was a natural musical: There is a David and Goliath story, a Cinderella story, a love story between two outcasts. It’s less about boxing than about finding self-respect and finding your soul mate.”

So, what can we expect from Rocky: The Musical?

Well, initially, we’d hoped it would just be two fellas on a stage knocking forty shades of shit out of each other, allowing pretentious theatre-goers to coo about how visceral and ‘powerfully brutal’ the whole spectacle is. However, it is clear that this wouldn’t be enough as a musical with no songs isn’t a musical at all.

As such, we’d like to see a rendition of a song called ‘Adrian’ (yes, that’s how you spell it. No, it isn’t ‘Adrienne’. We know. Don’t blame us), which sees the assembled cast delivering the name, over and over in the iconic manner that Stallone delivered it in the film, leaving audiences treated to a sound not unlike six bull seals being clubbed over the head with rubber mallets.

We’d also like to see a song based on the robot that Paulie gets for his birthday. And don’t forget James Brown’s ‘Livin’ In America’. It would be utterly, utterly pointless without it.

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Sylvester Stallone is a hilarious man with an even more hilarious face, topped by his even more amusing voice. He’s a man who has made a career of sounding like he’s been stung on the tongue by a nest of wasps.

Of course, he’s much more than a mere actor. He’s a director, writer and launched the movie themed Planet Hollywood restaurant chain which are uniformly awful. That said, it’s kinda cool to eat a burger next to Spock’s ears in a clear perspex case.

He’s also a big promoter of cigarettes in his films and likes getting caught in Australia with human growth hormone vials. And now, to add to this glittering CV, he’s going to launch a menswear line.

You heard.

Sly will be his very own clothing line and, bafflingly, it’ll be based on his two most famous roles – Rambo and Rocky. In his words, the range “looks for the rebel and the gentleman”, whatever that means.

So what can we look forward to? Well, aside from the dull t-shirts that will invariably hit the shelves that feature the words “ROCKY” and “RAMBO” on them, he could really go to town with his choices.

We’d like to see a sleeve made of pig meat which you sport, complete with First Blood wound which you can stitch up yourself in public while being pursued by a grimacing penis. We’d also enjoy it if you could by a facemask which makes you look like the blacked-up Rambo, complete with head band and perma-scowl.

As for the Rocky line, there should definitely by some kind of cap that fits on your head so tightly that if makes you talk like you’ve got brain damaged from being repeatedly punched in the mind by gigantic Russians.

Failing that, he should make tailor-made robot outfits that transform us into the robot that Paulie gets for his birthday in Rocky 4.

If these things don’t happen, then it’ll have been a ginormous waste of everybody’s time.

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Robocop was, in a way, the original plastic police officer, except he was made of metal and could actually arrest people, unlike his real life counterparts.

Made from the parts of an old police officer who was brutally murdered by Red Foreman from That 70s Show and scraps of metal collected from a dumpster out the back of the General Motors warehouse, Robocop kicked crimes ass all over Detroit.

People loved Robocop because he stood for law and order, by any means necessary. He was also near indestructible and made an awesome whirring sound whenever he moved, plus he had a massive gun and if there’s one things American’s love, it’s a hero with a miniature cannon strapped to them at all times.

The people of Detroit, and by people we mean geeks, wanted their metallic hero immortalised in… erm… metal, in the form of a statue. After all, Philadelphia has a Rocky statue, so why not reward another fictional character from the 80s who’s no longer relevant by making a permanent shrine to them.

The Mayor of Detroit, Dave Bing, received a tweet asking for him to put a statue of Robocop somewhere in the city to boost morale. After Bing had finished laughing he rather predictably put the kybosh on the whole thing.

This angered the geeks, who did what they do best when someone tells them they can’t do something. They took to the internet.

Rather incredibly the campaign was a hit, resulting in both a plot of land being donated for the statue to be built on as well as the sum of $56,000 being raised for the statue itself, smashing the $50,000 target.

So it looks like Robocop will have his own statue built in Detroit, conveniently just in time for the new Robocop film that is due to come out in 2013, not that that has anything to do with it you understand, it’s all just a massive coincidence… maybe… probably… not.

We here at hecklerspray aren’t against the statue per se. Actually, that’s a lie, we are. It is completely stupid to try and create a landmark to a fictional character, unless they’re considered to be some sort of deity. Think about it, in thousands of years, when the statue is found in the ruins of old Detroit, what will people think? They’ll think we’re buffoons, that what they’ll think.

A Robot policeman, honestly.

Besides, it’s plainly obvious for everyone to see that the people of Detroit chose the wrong character to immortalise. So the hecklerspray team has come up with a plan:

That’s right, let’s put a statue of ED-209 on the fourth plinth. Infinitely cooler, as trigger happy as the Met’s SO19 squad and hard as a coffin nail, he’ll really put London back on the map.

Suck on that, Detroit.

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Thanks to the success of the new Rocky film and the new Rambo film, Sylvester Stallone is on top of the world right now – and he knows exactly what to do next.

That's right – more Rocky and Rambo films! Possibly. Sylvester Stallone has just signed a two-movie deal to direct and star in two brand new action films, and already it's thought that Stallone is working on sequels to Rocky Balboa and the new Rambo movie.

And why not. Sylvester Stallone has only ever had three good ideas in his life, and two of them were Rocky and Rambo. He'd make a film of his third good idea, but it's hard to make figuring out that shoes go on your feet instead of your hands very cinematic.

Until Britney Spears records a new album called I Have A Distressing Mental Illness, there's not better example of art imitating life than Sylvester Stallone. When he made Rocky he was a nobody, just like Rocky. But by the time he made Rocky 5, he'd become like the Rocky of that movie, too – bloated, lazy, overprivileged and milking a single idea until it bleeds. And when Sylvester Stallone decided to make Rocky Balboa, he was at his lowest – just like Rocky. It was a graceful comeback for the both of them.

And there's a similar sort of thing with Rambo, too, only with more guns and fighting and throat-ripping and whatnot.

Anyway, the relative box office successes of Rocky Balboa and Rambo mean that Sylvester Stallone can do whatever he likes again. And, as we all know, that means a bunch of foreigners are going to be killed horribly. Reuters reports:

Boxoffice comeback champ Sylvester Stallone has inked a lucrative deal to direct and star in two action films with "Rambo" producer Danny Dimbort. Several scripts are being considered for follow-ups to his surprise hit sequels to "First Blood" and "Rocky." With Nu Image/Millennium's new Writers Guild of America interim deal speeding up the process, the first script is expected to be ready by the fall, with production set to begin shortly thereafter.

Now, obviously it hasn't been made explicit that Sylvester Stallone will make a new Rocky movie and a new Rambo movie – especially since he's been telling people that he doesn't want to make any more of either of them – but we can't see how he even has a choice, because the other options are so stupid.

The reason people have went to see Rocky and Rambo was because of nostalgia – give Stallone a fresh new character to play and he'll need to do ten times as much work to convince people to watch it, because it'd just be a film about an angry 61-year-old man. And the other alternative is even worse – a sequel to one of Sylvester Stallone's non-Rocky, non-Rambo films. Would you go and see Demolition Man 2: Back And Even More Demolitiony? Us neither.

So let's just assume that Sylvester Stallone is working on more Rambo movies – which begs the question of how the hell he's going to manage it. When he was making the last one Stallone was chugging Human Growth Hormone like a thing possessed, so it defies logic that someone so old and out of shape would want to try and recapture their youth even though they know that they're now nothing more than an embarrassing public figure of mockery.

No, wait, we were thinking of New Kids On The Block. Sylvester Stallone should be fine.

Read more:

Stallone back in action with 2-film deal – Reuters