Prime Video’s Fallout TV series takes a smart approach to the video game franchise canon. Rather than trying to adapt a particular game or storyline, it uses the Fallout games as a fictional and aesthetic baseline. But the series plants a few narrative flags, making decisions about who started the franchise’s nuclear war and giving one of its most iconic images, the character known as Vault Boy, a proper origin story.
Vault Boy is the smiling cartoon character featured on Vault-Tec posters, the Pip Boy computer interface, and other fictional products in the Fallout world. In the Fallout games, he’s a mascot used to illustrate players’ perks and abilities, and to reinforce the cheery, can-do attitude of Vault Dwellers. Vault Boy was originally inspired by Milburn Pennybags (aka Mr. Monopoly), the mascot of the board game Monopoly, and cartoon characters from the 1950s. Vault Boy has been in Fallout from the beginning.
[Ed. note: The rest of this post contains spoilers for Fallout season 1.]
The Fallout TV series reveals that the Vault Boy icon is based on one of the show’s protagonists, Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), who later transforms into The Ghoul. Before that tragic turn, Howard is a Hollywood actor who stars in Westerns, and he takes a gig promoting Vault-Tec’s vaults. In episode 3 of the Fallout show, Howard is shown suiting up in Vault Boy’s familiar blue-and-yellow jumpsuit, then posing for a Vault-Tec advertisement. He flashes a big smile and a thumbs-up, establishing the character’s look and go-to pose.
Image: Prime Video
Howard’s star power in Hollywood begins to lose its luster shortly thereafter. His peers shun him for working as a “pitchman for the end of the world,” and studios start cutting him from projects. In the credits of episode 3, we see what ultimately becomes of the actor’s role as Vault-Tec spokesman: A billboard promoting vaults that once featured a photo of Howard from that shoot has been partially stickered over, with the cartoon Vault Boy replacing Howard’s likeness. It remains a familiar image, but it’s now distinctive, with blond hair and a younger look.
Flash back to the first episode of Fallout, and we realize why Howard is reduced to working at kids’ birthday parties, and why he declines to deliver his signature thumbs-up when posing for photos at an event. “Given the state of everything,” Howard says to the birthday boy’s dad, amid growing fears of a nuclear war and personal strife, “I’d prefer not to.”
Image: Prime Video
Moments later in that episode, Fallout’s writers nod to another piece of (unofficial) Vault Boy backstory. Just before the bombs drop, Howard explains to his daughter Janey that when he was in the Marines, he was told, “If they ever drop a really big bomb, they told us to hold up your thumb just like this. And if the cloud is smaller than your thumb, you run for the hills.” This is a reference to an enduring Fallout fan theory that Vault Boy is performing a similar check with his pose — thumbs up, one eye closed, smiling from a safe distance.
Brian Fargo, former executive producer of the Fallout games, debunked this particular fan theory about Vault Boy in a tweet from 2013, saying Vault Boy “simply has a positive attitude.” But the TV show’s producers appear to lean into the “rule of thumb” hypothesis, one of many smartly crafted Easter eggs aimed directly at the hardcore Fallout audience. It’s an example of letting longtime fans craft part of the canon themselves.
All eight episodes of Fallout season 1 are now streaming on Prime Video.