FALLOUT Series Will Keep Its Twisted Sense of Humor and Vault Boy Will Get an Origin Story
We recently got our first real look at Amazon’s upcoming series adaptation of Fallout, which is being developed by Westworld’s Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. This looks like it’s going to be a good series that is set in the world of the games, but tells a whole new original story.
Regardless of the new story, Todd Howard, the director of Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 and executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, which developed the franchise, confirms that the series will have the same twisted sense of humor that the fans love about the game.
During an interview with Vanity Fair, Howard said: “We had a lot of conversations over the style of humor, the level of violence, the style of violence. Look, Fallout can be very dramatic, and dark, and postapocalyptic, but you need to weave in a little bit of a wink…. I think they threaded that needle really well on the TV show.”
One of those little winks comes from “Vault Boy,” the winking cartoon that perpetually flashes a giant smile and the thumbs-up sign. This is the logo of the Vault Dwellers, which is where the main character of the series, Lucy, resides.
This “Vault Boy” iconography was intended as “an ironic, tone-deaf contrast to the hardscrabble existence of those who endure on the surface.” It’s explained that Nolan and Joy’s wanted to maintain that “mordant comedy was the key to making the world work as a series.”
It was also revealed that Vault Boy will be getting an origin story, and in regard to that, Howard said: “That was something that they came up with that’s just really smart.” He obviously isn’t going to spoil any details on that storyline, but it will be interesting to see!
Howard went on to confirm that everything that happens in this series is canon and is officially part of Fallout lore. He said: “We view what’s happening in the show as canon. That’s what’s great, when someone else looks at your work and then translates it in some fashion. I sort of looked at it like, ‘Ah, why didn’t we do that?’”
The story centers on Lucy (Ella Purnell), who “has lived her entire life inside a subterranean vault, where every need and want has been satisfied while generations and generations await the day when it is safe to surface.”
It’s explained that “When a crisis forces Lucy to venture above on a rescue mission, she finds that the planet above remains a hellscape crawling with giant insects, voracious mutant animal ‘abominations,’ and a human population of sunbaked miscreants who make the manners, morals, and hygiene of the gunslinging Old West look like Downton Abbey… The games are about the culture of division and haves and have-nots that, unfortunately, have only gotten more and more acute in this country and around the world over the last decades,” Nolan tells Vanity Fair for this exclusive first look.
Fallout is scheduled to be released on April 12, 2024.