Fallout TV show will tell Vault Boy origin story

Fallout TV Show Art

The upcoming TV show based on Bethesda’s post-apocalyptic role-playing game Fallout will tell the origin story of the creation of mascot Vault Boy.

Vault Boy is the nod-and-wink comic relief of Fallout, a tone-deaf icon of authority that contrasts with the often bleak, violent, and dark satire of the sci-fi world.

“That was something that they came up with that’s just really smart,” said producer Todd Howard on the origin of the Vault Boy iconography, in a new report by Variety.

“We had a lot of conversations over the style of humor, the level of violence, the style of violence. Fallout can be very dramatic, and dark, and post apocalyptic, but you need to weave in a little bit of a wink…. I think they threaded that needle really well on the TV show,” he added.

Fallout follows three main characters; Lisa, a naive vault-dweller exploring the world above for the first time, Maximus, a soldier raised in the Brotherhood of Steel, and radiated nose-less mutant Ghoul, a bounty hunter who we’ll occasionally see in flashback from 100s of years before the bombs dropped.

The show is intended as canon and as such is part of the game history, which was one of the reasons Todd Howard chose to work with Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, co-creators of Westworld, on the project.

“I did not want to do an interpretation of an existing story we did,” said Howard. “That was the other thing - a lot of pitches were, you know, ‘This is the movie of Fallout 3…’ I was like, ‘Yeah, we told that story.’

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“I don’t have a lot of interest seeing those translated. I was interested in someone telling a unique Fallout story. Treat it like a game. It gives the creators of the series their own playground to play in.”

The variety report includes lots of images from the show, including Lisa exiting her vault, the Brotherhood of Steel and a close-up of their Power Armor, Walter Goggins as The Ghoul complete with missing nose, and Kyle MacLachlan as an overseer.

The Fallout TV show stars Kyle MacLachlan (Twin Peaks), Ella Purnell (Army of the Dead), Walton Goggins (Justified), Aaron Moten (The Transfiguration) and Sarita Choudhury (The Hunger Games), and is due for release on Amazon Prime April 12, 2024.