Your ’90s nostalgia for the club heyday of New York will be so intense when this is over that you’re going to have to watch Madonna’s doc Truth or Dare (Amazon/iTunes) or Parker Posey’s Party Girl (Tubi/Vudu/Amazon).
The Marky Mark Workout: Form, Focus, Fitness; 1993, 1 hour, 10 minutes
Gear: Three chairs, two dumbbells, a whole gym apparently???
Getup: Track pants, no shirt, backwards cap, Calvins
This Marky Mark workout video, released at the height of Marky Mark mania in the early ’90s, is a doozy. You see, before he was discovered by Paul Thomas Anderson, we used to call Mark Wahlberg “Marky Mark,” and he was known as a rapper, the younger brother of boy band royalty Donnie Wahlberg. Due to his famously sculpted physique and saggy, boxer-brief revealing jeans, he was conscripted into modeling underwear for Calvin Klein, and now he’s an Oscar-nominated actor with a burger empire. Whoda thunk?
The Marky Mark Workout: Form, Focus, Fitness is really only useful as a piece of fascinating ’90s ephemera and as a tool for understanding the Marky Mark phenomenon. Right away, we’re plunged into Marky Mark’s world, as he’s dragged out of bed for his morning workout by his “cousin” (every man in this video is his cousin; all the women are “fly honeys”).
After opening with his siren call, “pow!” (which he yells to punctuate various segments) Wahlberg explains his fitness philosophy, and then a man that I swear is introduced as “Cousin Jizz” leads Wahlberg and some fly honeys through a series of extreme stretches that, as a fitness professional, I would never advise anyone to do without warming up first. Then Wahlberg does a few basic weightlifting routines. Outside, next to the pool, with a couple of fly honeys, he does some lunges, squats, and dead lifts, as the monotone voice-over of a trainer offers tips on form. Inside, with only one fly honey, Wahlberg hilariously informs the audience that we’ll need “three chairs” to perform his push-up routine, even though there’s no reason why we might need three chairs to do the push-ups that he does, but go off.
The exercises are perfunctory at best, but the atmosphere is unbearably horny, as Wahlberg gets sweatier and sweatier, while heavy-breathing flirting with the fly honeys. You can totally see why Anderson eyed him for his porn epic, Boogie Nights. Later, he moves onto a gym routine, where his various “cousins” spot him, so you might as well just sit back on the couch and watch him work out for the last 30 minutes, unless you have gym machines around. But the whole thing seems orchestrated to quench the thirst of Marky Mark fans, and well, he delivers.