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Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky IV” is a remarkable movie. Released theatrically two years after Nicholas Meyer’s nightmare-inducing Cold War classic “The Day After” aired on ABC, it gave moviegoers hope that the enmity between the United States and the Soviet Union could be resolved by two big lugs pounding the crap out of each other in a boxing ring. It was a foregone conclusion that Stallone’s Philadelphia palooka would come out on top, but with glasnost unexpectedly on the global menu thanks to the newly elected General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, this felt like a righteous victory. Lo and behold, within six years, the bruising dream of “Rocky IV” would be realized, and the Soviet Union would be broken up into democratic republics. It was fun while it lasted.
“Rocky IV” was a forward-looking movie in another regard. With home computers on the rise, everyone figured it was only a matter of time before every home had a robot housekeeper. Rosie from “The Jetsons” seemed poised to become a reality. So, when Rocky Balboa gave his layabout, depressingly undesirable brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young) a robot for his birthday at the outset of “Rocky IV,” we believed the future had arrived. Soon, we could all afford to give our layabout, depressingly undesirable relatives a robot companion.
Alas, “Rocky IV” dreamed too big. We now have robots that clean our floors and freak out our cats, but that’s about as far as it goes. In Stallone’s defense, however, he wasn’t trying to get our hopes up. When he wrote the robot into “Rocky IV,” he wasn’t thinking about revolutionizing the way we live; he was looking to make the world more accessible to his autistic son, Seargeoh.
Paulie’s robot was a benevolent creation too pure for this world
In a 2014 interview with Trivia Happy, International Robotics founder Robert Doornick revealed that Stallone became interested in the robot named Sico when he saw a television story about how it interacted with autistic children. According to Doornick, “We got a call from the Stallone family. They were very interested in how the robot could work with his son. One thing led to another and Stallone completely became enamored with Sico, that particular character.”
This is lovely. Had I known this 40 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have spent the next 40 years of my life poking fun at Paulie’s robot. Unfortunately, because this was not common knowledge, the robot became such a punchline with fans that Stallone completely excised it from “Rocky IV” when he re-cut the film as “Rocky IV: Rocky vs. Drago” in 2021. “The robot is going to the junkyard forever,” he said at the time. “No more robot.”
Doornick didn’t take Sico’s disappearance too hard. Indeed, he had an alternate theory as to why Stallone removed the robot. As he told Empire in 2020:
“I was in my office when I found out. I was deluged with messages: ‘How can Stallone do that?’ But I know why he’s doing it, because I know he loves the robot. By causing turmoil among the fans of Sico, it generates more publicity. And by removing the robot from the movie, it saves money in royalty fees, because he is a member of the Screen Actors Guild. Sico receives cheques all the time — and of course he sends them over to me.”
The good news is that the version of “Rocky IV” that’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video is the 87-minute version that was released theatrically in 1985. Sico yet lives. Hopefully, Stallone eventually relents and reinserts the robot back into the film that, for a brief time, aided in the fall of authoritarianism in Eastern Europe.
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