Blockbuster Web Sites
by Heather ChampMy jaw no longer drops when I see the now obligatory URL [recent sitings include http://www.lastman.com, http://extrememeasures.com, http://www.mgm.com/2days/, and http://www.timetokill.com] at the bottom of a film trailer while waiting for the screening of the main event. Movies will continue to battle over box office receipts and standings, but it's still possible to peruse the Web sites of the summer of '96 blockbusters (the subtitle of this week's column could read "My Summer at the Web Sites"). Ready your thumbs à la Siskel and Ebert as we take a tour through the four Blockbuster Web sites.
I can't remember which movie was the first to make a foray onto the Web but it's now become quite a standard practice to further lure audiences. "Twister," "Mission Impossible," "Eraser," and "Independence Day" were creating a buzz long before they made it to the large screen.
The four sites share a number of similarities. Black is the common background color, and they all have inordinate download times for fairly kludgy graphics, GIF animations, and/or Shockwave elements. [You might want to install the Shockwave plug-in if you haven't already and jack up your browser ram partition. I continually ran out of memory the first time I hit ID4, and there is nothing more frustrating than an out-of-memory error message.]
Once you get past Twister's splash screen you see a simple, elegant design metaphor, and a black background and green typewriter text with the dreaded blink tag and client pull, which approximates logging onto an ASCII-based system to read e-mail messages with dire warnings of incoming weather systems and links to S.W.I.R.L., the Severe Weather Institute Research Lab.
Mission Impossible also mimics an ASCII text system. But by far the best nugget of the site is the Shockwave Retinal Scan. When the eye blinks . . . I've said too much.
Eraser is a site that is sure to appeal to the both the inherent paranoia and the vanity within all of us. In the "Get Erased--Erase Yourself" section there are links to a number of online search engines in which you are encouraged to enter your own name to determine how wired you've become. At the Switchboard I found another Heather Champ in Kansas, which explains the e-mail I've received from people inquiring whether I'm the Heather Champ who babysat them back in Wichita.
Independence Day now begins with "The Web site that drove North America wild reopens for the rest of the world" as the site will relaunch October 3 in accordance with the European release. Subsections of the original site have been named appropriately "Area 51" (resources for alien-related sites), "Contact," "Launch Pad," "Freedom Fighters," "Propaganda" (screensavers and digital freebies), "Behind The Scenes," "Uplinks," and the "Liberty Game." The "Liberty Game" will be new and improved for the relaunch of the site, with a new multiplayer game providing "unprecedented interactivity." All in all it's a rather ugly site, but smart in the way that they've used existing Web resources and language to further the metaphor.
In all four sites the designers have examined and exploited the Web to extend the metaphor of the movie content through the GUIs. All the sites have taken advantage of the ever-growing pool of Web resources that redefine and contribute to current ways of thinking about Web design.
