Forrest Gump - Revisited

Cafe Society
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Just rewatched “Forrest Gump” for the first time in ages. I had some questions on the military scenes…and some special effects:

  1. When Forrest is the first to clean his gun, breaking the company record, the Drill Sargeant says something like “I’d make you OCS, if I didn’t want to lose you.” What does this acronym mean? i seem to recall it refers to being reassigned vs. “TDY” (tour of duty) which I presume is temporary?

  2. When Forrest first meets Lt. Dan, the men are cooking steaks? Is that realisitic?

  3. In that same scene, Lt. Dan makes a comment “you’ll meet your platoon leader…”; yet, it is actually Lt. Dan who leads the platoon into combat. Is that technically accurate? Wouldn’t the platoon leader have led the platoon into combat? (And, if so, what would be Lt. Dan’s purpose?)

  4. When Gump rescues Lt. Dan, why didn’t Lt. Dan give Gump a direct order to put him down? (If you watch this scene again, Lt. Dan does NOT give Gump an order.)
    Considering Gump’s personality, would he have disobeyed a direct order under those circumstances?

  5. How did they make Lt. Dan look like he really lost his legs? Could the actor have had short legs, enough that his pants legs could be tied off allowing the legs to look amputated, I WAG? (Later, when we see his prosthetic leg, he lifts his pant leg to show as little as possible.)

  6. When the heavy combat begins, two guys (I think) are blown away by a fireball (before the napalm part of this scene). Were they just dummies, and the fire was somehow real? Was the fire just a camera trick “dubbed in” later? Or, what?

  7. Did they train Tom Hanks to be a ping-pong pro? How were those scenes done? I WAG an expert ping-pong player was fimed and, like they “dubbed” Hanks into scenes with real 1960’s footage, they “dubbed” Hanks into these scenes? Perhaps, Hanks repeated the same hand motions against a “green screen”?

  8. Last, would you agree the floating feather (opening and closing scenes) was computer animated?

I didn’t mean to overwhelm, so answer what one can. Inquring minds want to know!

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And how did they have Lyndon Johnson talk to Forrest? Did they make a puppet out of his corpse?

3

  1. Officer Candidate School - training to become an officer

  2. Special effects, mostly. Green screen stockings for his legs, which were then removed digitally in post production.

  3. Again special effects - I suspect the ball was just added in after

4

Making of the Feather scene.

Short answer: real feather, blue screened into the shot.

5

Dan could be the company commander (a position normally held by a captain) with two or three second-lieutenants under him acting as platoon commanders.

As for movie ping-pong, I figure it’s like movie sword fighting; you can make it look good with a lot of rehearsing, an opponent who isn’t actually trying to beat you, and a good film editor to cut the footage right.

6

Or depending on the unit and the casualties they’d sustained, a 1st Lt as CO, and a mix of 2nd Lieutenants and senior NCOs as platoon commanders.

7

Cooking steaks? Absolutely, in a rear-echelon area. We used to trade things like light fixtures for cases of steaks from the Marine galley. On front lines, they’d be eating C-rations, but when back for R&R, better food was to be had.

Oh, and TDY is temporary duty, not tour of duty. A tour of duty is the full duration of assignment, usually one year in a combat zone, or between 2-4 years back in the states. In the Navy it’s TAD, for some reason, meaning tempory assigned duty.

I was a platoon commander as an E-7, and even briefly as an E-6.

8

I believe that all of the ping pong was just Tom Hanks waving his paddle around and then balls being added digitally later.

9

Yes, I read a story about that. Much easier to just add the ball later to synch up with the paddle strokes.

Little known “fact” – they amputated Gary Sinese’s legs below the knees and re-attached them later. They paid him 5 million dollrs for that alone!

10

In the scene where Gump is playing ping pong against a Chinese pro, they used a real Chinese expert player and told him to just pretend he was hitting a ball back and forth with Tom Hanks. The guy has been playing with a ball for his whole professional career and couldn’t wrap his head around the idea of swinging his paddle at nothing, so the shot took a while.

And yes, the answers to (5), (6), (7) and (8) are GGI- computer animation.

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  1. Perhaps you’ve confused “OCS” with “PCS”, which refers to a Permanent Change of Station.
  2. Yeah, back at the firebase they occasionally grilled steaks for us. Once it was water buffalo steaks thanks to a very green and nervous Pvt with an M-60 on his first night on perimeter guard.
  3. Maybe Lt. Dan said “Platoon Sergeant”?

The basic Army Infantry unit is a “Squad”. In my time, it was 12 men including the Squad Leader (Sgt or SSgt) and an Assistant SL (Corp). And a Platoon was 3 squads plus a Platoon Leader (2nd LT) and a Platoon Sergeant (SSgt or SFC).

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There’s another current thread on the legless scenes.

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And a squad was three fire teams (at least when I was in). A platoon could be 3 or 4 squads, but usually the former. It depended on whether or not you had a short company. For the Seabees, the platoon leader was usually a Chief Petty Officer (E-7) and squad leaders were either E-6 or senior E-5, depending on manning levels. In a larger company such as Alpha Company, a platoon leader might be an Ensign (O-1) or a junior LTJG (O-2). In one case, my company commander was a Warrant Officer.