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How do you take an Academy Award winning motion picture and render it irrelevant? It’s a daunting task, but GTE Entertainment, in cahoots with Upstream Multimedia, have proven themselves capable of doing it. Forrest Gump: Music, Artists and Times adds precious little to your appreciation for the movie, the music, the artists, or the era.
The first sign of trouble is the manual – written in a somber, self-important sensitive tone of unrelenting condescension guaranteed to alienate most thinking beings. In addition to detailing the very simple and straightforward installation procedure, the manual promises a “reflective journey through the mirror of music”, urging you to”pause to contemplate the legacy of a generation”. Yecch. Not only is the rest of the manual full of this sort of treacle, it fails to live up to its promise.
The material is spread out over 3 CD-ROMs. Clicking on a song title will take you to a screen for that song and the artist who recorded it. Content is divided between the song and the artist, so dragging your mouse over the title of the song will bring up a pop-up menu with a video clip from the movie where the song was played, song lyrics accompanied by a looped snippet of the song, a video clip of the song being performed, and some information about the song and album. On the artist side of the screen you can bring up a menu with a few video clips of the artist discussing the song and times, background on the artist or band, and a lengthy interview. Additionally, on a separate part of every screen is a link to a timeline of events from the 50′s, 60′s and 70′s as well as a link to portions of the actual screenplay.
With all this stuff how can this program go wrong? A number of ways actually. First off, there’s the interface. Standard point-and-click interaction has been taken to a frightening new place with a frustratingly finicky interface that dooms you to an endless search for just the right pixel to trigger the menu selection. Frantic clicking on subjects with no result is unpleasantly common. This aggravation reached an all-time high when, frustrated by my inability to move forward in the program, I tried to quit – I could not for the life of me get the quit command to work. I practically ground my teeth to powder before exiting and being treated to an inescapable and lengthy credit sequence. Here’s a treat – you get to sit through the credits every time you run the program.
I ran this program on a 486DX/66 with 8MB of RAM – well, I guess you could call it running. The manual “recommends” 12 MB of RAM but it should frankly just flat out specify you need that much. While the Quicktime video clips ran passably on my machine, it was nigh onto impossible to scroll through text pieces while music played and I experienced all sort of new and exciting ways for my computer to crash. I grew particularly fond of the menu distortion effect. With trouble like this, I shudder at the thought of some poor guy trying to run this on a 486/33.
Technical torment aside, Forrest Gump: Music, Artists and Times doesn’t deliver the goods in its stated purpose to explore “common themes, like the threads of a tapestry.” Yikes, there’s that manual talking again. While clips from the movie are kinda fun to watch, they really don’t enhance the alleged exploration in any way. They especially don’t do anything to add to the meaning of the music, and it’s this constant lack of substance that is the program’s biggest downfall. The music in the film was used primarily to suggest a time in history and little else, sort of a sonic signpost. And while the clips of the artists performing are fun to watch as well, they too do little if anything to weave that tapestry.
Forrest Gump: Music, Artists and Times commits a big faux pas for a multimedia product by having the bulk of its content in dry text. The interviews with the artists are all more or less the same, with more or less the same questions being asked of everyone. Here’s a big surprise – they all liked the movie. Unfortunately, the interviewer has confused the act of asking questions for interviewing and generally fails to unearth any real insights. There are a few, but they are few and far between. The Milestones timeline also doesn’t deliver the goods in helping establish the mood and spirit of the times, giving brief unevocative history encapsulations for everything from man walking on the moon to JFK. The hotlinks to relevant other portions do little to clarify things as well. For example, there’s a hotlink in the Cuban missile crisis portion that hints that “Michelle Philips was scared”. Click on it and you’re taken to a portion of her interview where she confides that she saw “ships headed south in a long convoy and it was very, very frightening.” Wow. What a powerful image. Glad she elaborated.
Fans of the film may find something here to enjoy, as may people nostalgic for that era. Most people, however, are going to find little in Forrest Gump: Music, Artists and Times to make it worth their while. It’s a shame really – handled properly such an exploration of film, music and history could be fascinating.
| Product: | Forrest Gump: Music, Artists and Times |
| Company: | GTE Entertainment |
| Cost: | $34.95 |
WINDOWS: 486DX/33MHZ or faster, 8MB RAM (12MB
recommended), 640X480 SVGA resolution, 256 colors (thousands recommended), Windows 3.1
or later (Windows 95 recommended), 2X CD-ROM drive, 5MB hard disk space, SoundBlaster 16
or Windows compatible sound card, Apple Quicktime 2.03 (included on disk) MACINTOSH:
Mac with 68030 CPU or faster, Color Macintosh capable of displaying 256 colors (thousands
recommended), System 7.1 or higher, 8MB RAM (12 MB recommended), 2X CD-ROM drive,
4MB hard drive space, Apple Quicktime 2.1 (included on disk)
No Spam
Adult 
Gambling
Unfinished
Deception
Plagiarism
Not English
