Trivia / Fallout (2024)

• Approval of God: Tim Cain, one of the original creators of the series, gave his glowing recommendation of the first two episodes when he went to the Hollywood premiere. Tim would later make a more dedicated video reviewing the entire season, where he would continue to heap his praise about how the show realized so many of his ideas for the games and how the writing captured the spirit of Fallout.
• Ascended Fanon:
  • The finale canonizes a long-running fan theory on the beginning of the Great War: it was deliberately escalated by Vault-Tec themselves, and they (possibly) fired the first nuke.
  • It was a popular fan theory that Vault Boy's iconic thumbs-up pose is alluding to the myth that you can use your thumb to judge the distance of a detonated nuke: if your thumb covers the mushroom cloud, run for the hills; if it doesn't, you're already screwed^note According to this article, the myth was complete bunk to begin with. This theory was debunked by Brian Fargo and Tramell Ray Isaac, the former head of Interplay and Vault Boy's designer respectively, but the live-action series makes reference to it in the first episode, with Cooper Howard telling his daughter about it. In-universe, Cooper Howard was the model for Vault Boy and the iconic pose was a Throw It In! by him at the last second, bringing the theory full circle.
• Banned in China: Due to the premise about a nuclear war between the U.S. and China, the show lacks a Chinese dub, either for Mainland China or Taiwan.
• California Doubling: Inverted. The series is largely set in the remains of Los Angeles, but it was filmed in New York, New Jersey, and Utah, with some desert and wasteland scenes filmed in Namibia.
• Character Outlives Actor: Robert House appears in a pre-war flashback scene, now portrayed by Rafi Silver after René Auberjonois' death in 2019.
• Colbert Bump: The series's release led to a renewed interest all over the board with the whole franchise, not just in terms of video games (which spiked really high), but also other media - tabletop games, comics and the like. It reaches the point of a joke within the fandom how Bethesda managed to earn money equal to releasing a new Fallout game without doing so.
• Dawson Casting: A strange case of this. Moises Arias plays Norm, Lucy’s younger brother who is supposed to be a teen. Except Arias is about two years older than Lucy’s actress Ella Purnell.
• Fake American: American-accented Lucy is portrayed by English actress Ella Purnell.
• Follow the Leader: The creators confirmed that the successful video game adaptation of The Last of Us was key to this show getting greenlit by Prime Video.
• Lying Creator: Part of the creators' insistence that the show would be a canon entry in the franchise in the leadup to release included assurance that the show would not engage in any Cutting Off the Branches for previous entries. Despite this, the show's very first episode featured an appearance by the Prydwen from Fallout 4 intact and still operational in the Brotherhood's service, with reference made to members of the organization still operating within the Commonwealth. Due to the Institute and Railroad endings requiring destroying the Prydwen, this leaves only the Brotherhood and Minutemen endings plausible and invalidating half of the game's potential endings. Additionally, The Stinger for the Season 1 finale indicates the show will showcase the city of New Vegas heavily in the second season, which by its nature will require either choosing a specific ending to Fallout: New Vegas as canon or rendering the player's choice of ending irrelevant somehow.
• Method Acting: In an interview with British GQ, Ella Purnell claimed in order to achieve Lucy's hopeless mindset after learning the truth about her father in the finale, she remembered the time her most prized possessions were stolen from her while she was moving.
• Promoted Fanboy: A lot of the cast and crew are fans of the Fallout video games and were eager to adapt it into a series.
  • Jonathan Nolan, the main executive producer and director for the first three episodes, has stated that he practically spent a year playing Fallout 3. In fact, it was because of his familiarity with Fallout that convinced Todd Howard to allow the show to be greenlit.
  • Showrunner and Co-Creator Graham Wagner likewise is a major fan, having played through all the mainline games when they released.
  • According to Tim Cain, he noticed when watching the first two episodes how one of the characters walked and moved a lot like some characters from Fallout 1 (the series entry he directed back in 1997). When Cain asked about this to one of the show's directors, he was told that the actor had thrown it in during filming since it was game-accurate. Both Cain and the director could tell the actor was a huge fan.
• The Other Darrin: The Mister Handies in the show are voiced by Matt Berry instead of Stephen Russell (who voiced them in East Coast games) or Fred Tatasciore (who voiced them in New Vegas).
• Production Posse: Graham Wagner was previously a producer on Portlandia, which is apparently why Fred Armisen has a cameo.
• Those Two Actors: In the Japanese dub, Miyuki Sawashiro (Lucy) and Shunsuke Takeuchi (The Ghoul) had previously worked together in other works, including the dub of Rebel Moon (as Kora and Tarak respectively), Barbie (2023) (Writer Barbie and Beach Ken) and also in the Street Fighter franchise as Cammy and Jamie respectively.
• Word of God: In response to many fan concerns that New Vegas was rendered non-canonical due to the "Fall of Shady Sands" and the ambiguous date of the capital being bombed possibly conflicting with the series' timeline, Todd Howard and Jonathan Nolan both confirmed that New Vegas is still canon to the series with the bombs falling just after the events of the game, although it's admitted that the window of that happening is "tight."

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