Trailer Fallout - Official Trailer

[Kaodi]

Do you think the Nolan boys were just sitting around the kitchen table one day and were like, "What if you made a movie about the father of the atom bomb and I made a series about the future of the atom bomb?"

 

[trappedslider]

Exactly, these don’t bother me so much with the whole vintage but more advanced than current tech vibe of FO.

so the vibe is meant to be retrofuturism or Raygun Gothic. Basically everything but the evil commies (became Chinese instead of Russia) stopped at the 1950s, the music, the clothes, the cars just stopped at the 50s look and feel more or less.

 

[Ryujin]

so the vibe is meant to be retrofuturism or Raygun Gothic. Basically everything but the evil commies (became Chinese instead of Russia) stopped at the 1950s, the music, the clothes, the cars just stopped at the 50s look and feel more or less.

The aesthetic reminds me very much of a short story called "The Gernsback Continuum", by William Gibson, that was published in his anthology "Burning Chrome."

http://writing2.richmond.edu/jessid/eng216/gernsback.pdf

 

[trappedslider]

The aesthetic reminds me very much of a short story called "The Gernsback Continuum", by William Gibson, that was published in his anthology "Burning Chrome."

http://writing2.richmond.edu/jessid/eng216/gernsback.pdf

That's the source of the "ray gun gothic" term iirc

 

[Ruin Explorer]

so the vibe is meant to be retrofuturism or Raygun Gothic. Basically everything but the evil commies (became Chinese instead of Russia) stopped at the 1950s, the music, the clothes, the cars just stopped at the 50s look and feel more or less.

That's only a part of the Fallout vibe.

One of the big issues Bethesda had was that they saw that as 100% of the vibe. But it isn't. FO1/2/NV were intentionally a collision of multiple different vibes - the '50s retrofuture was just the one most unfamiliar to most people so tended to stick out. There's also a big Mad Max vibe, a more modernist vibe for the NCR, which is consciously post-50s in the way it is designed, and the Enclave originally had a big men-in-black/deep state (before that became an idiot's term) vibes, which were distinctly more futuristic still - you can see this incredibly easily in the design of the Enclave's power armour, for example. And there's a whole bunch of Western stuff going on too - which this show goes pretty hard with I note. There's also a general rugged industrial-ness going on that's actually quite post-50s, in 1/2/NV, with a lot of stuff that's more 60s through 80s - including quite modern weapon designs. FO3 completely skips all of that (understandable with the Western stuff as neither it nor FO4 are in the West, but the rest was dumped because they didn't get it - people were pointing this out as far back as the original reveal of FO3, note), and only does 1950s, even dragging stuff like the raiders and so on, who had Mad Max vibes, into become 1950s-style greaser gangs and the like, and completely abandoning all rebuilding, just having people all be stuck in time in ways that make no sense. It's particularly bad with the Enclave, because it loses their entire aesthetic concept despite them being a major element.

FO4 improved things slightly, but only by reinventing the wheel - The Institute has 1960s and 1970s design aesthetics to make them look relatively more futuristic, which ends up making it look slightly NCR-ish. It still has everyone else cosplaying the '50s in a way that makes zero sense - the people from the Vaults should absolutely be doing that, but cities which have been around for 200+ years? They'd have their own whole takes, which might well reference pre-war styles like post-Roman societies referenced Roman ones, but which wouldn't just be cosplaying in dirty, worn costumes. It's so ingrained that even the awful crappy early villain of FO4 is basically a 1950s guy in a way that just makes it seem like he stepped out of an attempt to make Full Throttle (the OTHER 1950s vibes post-apocalyptic retro-future! Actually predated Fallout) edgier.

The show used more of the aesthetics than FO3/4, including, notably, the NCR Ranger armour, presumably to show a certain character was a retired Ranger, and it looks notably higher-tech compared to a lot of what we saw, distinguishing it as being from a different aesthetic culture (the NCR as opposed to pre-war). Also I think that they had guns that looked like they'd escaped from various FO games, from FO1 to FO4. In fact I can confirm that thanks to this! There are also appropriately janky-looking real-world weapons, which all Fallout games have done.

 

[payn]

On the topic if episode 8;

Spoiler

The lights all coming on thing made some sense to me. Clearly, Moldaver knew about the possibility of getting her hands on the cold fusion. She had a machine ready to distribute the energy. It makes sense the NCR would have prepared for the moment with updated lighting fixtures. At least that’s how I reasoned it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

so the vibe is meant to be retrofuturism or Raygun Gothic. Basically everything but the evil commies (became Chinese instead of Russia) stopped at the 1950s, the music, the clothes, the cars just stopped at the 50s look and feel more or less.

It isn't just the aesthetic, though; they have usable personal robots, power armor, tilt rotors and advanced drugs (and though they haven't shown up the show yet, energy weapons), but the TVs still don't seem appreciably better than early 60's (I think they're color, but that's about it). And of course there's subtle things; can't tell if the cars in the show are supposed to be atomic powered like the ones in the game or not.

 

[trappedslider]

It isn't just the aesthetic, though; they have usable personal robots, power armor, tilt rotors and advanced drugs (and though they haven't shown up the show yet, energy weapons), but the TVs still don't seem appreciably better than early 60's (I think they're color, but that's about it). And of course there's subtle things; can't tell if the cars in the show are supposed to be atomic powered like the ones in the game or not.

On energy weapons Moldaver is seen holding a laser pistol during the BoS attack and the tvs flip between being color and BW in game. I'm guessing the cars are meant to be implied to be atomic powered, unless they want cars to blow up every time some one looks at them wrong (as they tend to do in at least FO4)

 

[MarkB]

On the topic if episode 8;

Spoiler

The lights all coming on thing made some sense to me. Clearly, Moldaver knew about the possibility of getting her hands on the cold fusion. She had a machine ready to distribute the energy. It makes sense the NCR would have prepared for the moment with updated lighting fixtures. At least that’s how I reasoned it.

Actually, this could be another tie-in to Fallout New Vegas. In that game, the crux of the NCR / Legion / Mr House conflict is control of the Hoover Dam, with the NCR planning to restore power cables to redistribute the power all the way back to California. It's possible that in this timeline that outcome was never fully realised, but that the NCR had got as far as restoring much of the local power infrastructure in anticipation of it. Moldaver would then have simply needed to piggy-back onto that existing infrastructure.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Actually, this could be another tie-in to Fallout New Vegas. In that game, the crux of the NCR / Legion / Mr House conflict is control of the Hoover Dam, with the NCR planning to restore power cables to redistribute the power all the way back to California. It's possible that in this timeline that outcome was never fully realised, but that the NCR had got as far as restoring much of the local power infrastructure in anticipation of it. Moldaver would then have simply needed to piggy-back onto that existing infrastructure.

That's a nice link if so.