Forrest Gump: Celebrating its 30th anniversary by revisiting its most memorable scene

Last Updated on October 14, 2024

Forrest Gump gets a bad rap. In hindsight, it’s easy to dismiss Robert Zemeckis’s film, which starred Tom Hanks as the simple (but sweet) title character as cheesy. This is especially true if you compare it to the movies it beat at the Academy Awards that year – Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption – both of which have gone on to become unchallengeable classics. But the fact remains that Forrest Gump was a monster hit in 1994, with it the second highest-grossing movie of the year (behind The Lion King) and a signature role (for a while) for star Tom Hanks.

In this adaptation of the Winston Groom novel, Forrest Gump bears witness to most of the defining events of the second half of the twentieth century, including the Vietnam War, Watergate, and, eventually, the AIDS Crisis. The film was a landmark in VFX, as Tom Hanks was able to be inserted into old news footage to make it look like he met JFK, Lyndon Johnson, John Lennon, and Richard Nixon, all of which seems quaint nowadays—but in ’94, it was mind-blowing.

Yet, when many of us look back at the movie, the scene we remember most has less to do with VFX and more to do with the character’s unique impact on those around him. In this episode of Scene Breakdown, our host Kier Gomes breaks down the movie’s famous running montage, where a brokenhearted Gump goes on a cross-country run, inspiring, among other things, the famous catchphrase “sh*t happens.”

Check out the episode embedded above and let us know in the comments if you think Forrest Gump stands the test of time.