As an absolutely rabid fan of the video game franchise Fallout, I wasn’t holding out too much hope for a quality television series that could even come close to the in-game world building. However, after a second, longer trailer dropped Thursday morning, my Fallout frown is turning upside down. There are many, many more nuggets for fans to feast on in this new trailer, including a smiling Vault Boy bobble head and a real-life Stimpack.
The games take place in Nevada, California, Boston, Washington D.C. and West Virginia. In this previews, we see a glimpse of a Shady Sands sign and a Hollywood Blvd sign, so we can guess the show is probably set in the New California Republic some 200 years after all-out nuclear war.
If you haven’t seen it yet, give it a minute now. We get an intro to vault life, which looks unusually wholesome, considering Vault Tech’s hidden ambitions. We also learn more about our ghoul main character and even get a few seconds of the militant Brotherhood of Steel. If this means nothing to you, I suggest you turn on your gaming system and disappear for a few days into the wild, rich world of the wastelands:
Of course, there are multiple forms of transportation in the show, though most of them are rusted out derelicts. The same is true in the game, of course. My only problem with it so far is one glaring omission: Where is the Corvega?
The video game actually features several in-game vehicles (which you can learn about in amazing detail from gaming youtuber Oxhorn), but the Corvega is the star of the Fallout series, especially since one of the first missions you run in Fallout 4 is through a Corvega plant (be sure to pick up all those aluminum coolant caps! You’re gonna need them.)
Made by the “Chryslus Motors” company in the game, the Corvega is a mishmash of the Chevy Corvair and the Chevy Vega, but is actually closer to Ford’s nuclear-powered concept cars from the early ’60s, like the Ford Nucleon and the Ford Seattle-ite XXI. The Corvega itself is nuclear powered, serving as a symbol for how fast and loose humanity was playing with atom splitting before the end, as well as giving players something fun to blow up. A few shots turns an intact abandon Corvair into a little mushroom cloud, and it’s my favorite thing to do on lengthy vertibird (helicopters in the game) rides.
Lack of a Corvega aside, the show uses cars to drive home the emptiness of the surviving world and, in classic Fallout fashion, it sticks with classic cars to give the world its signature retro feel. I spotted four scenes in the new trailer featuring cars, so let’s dive into them!
Here we have a beautiful 1951 DeSoto Custom rusting away along with a teal and white car that could only be a Chevy Bel Air on the outskirts of a destroyed city. The DeSoto actually looks fairly similar to an in-game station wagon featured in Fallout 4, I think. At least the handle placement and window configuration. But that front end is pure Studebaker Starlight. It’s also nuclear-powered (sensing a theme here?) You’ve also gotta love that clear bubble top:
I actually prefer Hollywood Boulevard like this. We’ve got the pointy back end of another Bel Air in there along with a ’60s era school bus and another rusting hulk I can’t quite make out, but is giving Volkswagen Beetle vibes.
This scene appears to be from a car and airplane graveyard deep in the middle of the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. Much of the show was shot in Jersey, so it’s a safe bet. It’s hard to judge what these cars are, but I definitely see a few ’30s Plymouths sitting in the piles. These rust buckets in the middle of the Pine Barrens already have an end-of-the-world feel, and we haven’t even been hit by a nuke (yet!)
Here we see a Chevrolet Apache Pickup somehow escaping the sands of both time and California. If the dog at the Ghoul character’s side isn’t named Dogmeat I will immediately turn the show off and never watch it again.
And here we’ve got some old vintage buses, though I couldn’t begin to make out what they are. If you know, sounds off in the comments please and thank you.
As an honorable mention: Holy shit, that’s the Prydwen! It’s a kind of armored blimp/traveling headquarters and flagship of the technology-obsessed Brotherhood of Steel. Those weird-looking choppers (we’d call them Vertical Take Off and Landing vehicles, or VTOLs) next to the Prydwen are the aforementioned vertibirds, used for scouting missions or traveling a long way on the map if you’re playing in Survival Mode (and you should.)
Can you imagine seeing this thing in the sky today, let alone 200 years after a nuclear war wiped out 99.99 percent of flying? Never mind the characters with foreign accents running around. It makes sense in video game logic, trust me.