Partly in preparation for the forthcoming, incredibly ill-conceived sixth sequel, but mostly just because I don't know that I've ever sat through all five Rocky movies in order in any condensed span of time, we rented all five from Netflix this week.

In addition to cataloguing a startling amount of discontinuity between the sequels -- alongside the famous rapid aging of Rocky's son, there's also the very perplexing matter of Rocky's bad eye -- my primary discovery from this important critical investigation was the unexpected and unmitigated awfulness of Rocky IV.

Among other things, I'd completely forgotten about Paulie's robot.