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The tradition of the fat kid being the Catcher continues, as does the same trend of said fat kid being the team smart ass. Patrick Renna made a pre-teen career out of that role, but at least in the Sandlot, he was in a good film, and was given a couple of clever lines.

Rocky III may have been the movie where the Italian Stallion sold his soul to the box office, but it was also the flick that gave us one of the greatest fads of the 1980’s, Mr. T. He was far from a great actor, but he looked perfect as James “Clubber” Lang; the hardened fighter from Chicago who learned to box in prison. Actually, he was portrayed as someone who Rocky couldn’t beat at all. They never claimed in the original Rocky movie that Balboa was undefeated going into the initial match with Apollo Creed. In fact, Rocky’s record wasn’t that good, though still it was never implied that he was destroyed in a fight. As such, Clubber Lang was the first man we saw demolish our cinematic hero in the ring (It was a second round KO) and take the World Heavyweight Championship. Of course Rocky got revenge in pure cinematic fashion, but Clubber was the man we wanted to hate. Actually we hated him so much, that we couldn’t get enough of him and turned him into a “good guy”. Mr. T became the top television action star of the 80’s; and yes it was all because of Clubber Lang.

With perennial FAHOF actor, Woody Harrelson as an opponent in Ron Shelton as a director, how did this fail? This is such a shame, as this is our only real shot to vote for an underrated actor in Antonio Banderas. Sorry, Mr. Cesar Dominguez, this wasn’t your fight.

We did not see much of Butch Coolidge’s in ring performance where he pummeled a boxer to death and shafted over crime boss, Marcellus Wiley, who he had earlier agreed to take a dive, but it was his other actions in the movie that made Butch a memorable character in the cult classic, Pulp Fiction. We saw Butch take out Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and save the man who wanted him dead for his earlier betrayal (Marcellus) from continued sodomizing; you know, your typical weekend. More than all of that it put Bruce Willis back in the “cool kids” table at Hollywood, where we will argue he still remains.