‘A Boy and his Dog’: The movie that inspired ‘Fallout’
First on PC, latterly on consoles, and now on streaming, the expanded Fallout universe has always carried a distinct tone that balances retrofuturism and ominous nostalgia for the 1950s nuclear age with action, horror, drama, thrills, and no small amount of jet-black comedy, but it had to be inspired from somewhere.
It’s a tricky balancing act to strike, but having long since mastered it in the realm of video games, it was encouraging to see the TV series continue to do justice to the post-apocalyptic Wasteland the United States has become in canon without sacrificing the elements that made Fallout so uniquely popular to begin with.
By appealing to both existing fans and new converts, executive producers Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy accomplished what so many other video game adaptations have failed to achieve, but things wouldn’t have reached such a point in the first place were it not for Harlan Ellison’s short story A Boy and His Dog, which was brought to the screen by writer and director L.Q. Jones in 1975.
Fittingly given the live-action Fallout hit screens the very same year, the film’s story unfurls in the desolate future of 2024, where Don Johnson’s Vic travels the ruins of what used to be civilisation alongside his telepathic dog, Blood.
The pair end up falling foul of an enigmatic community who dwell underground, with a love interest tossing an additional spanner into the works that leaves Vic’s trusty canine companion to fend for himself until his human accomplice realises the error of his ways and sets out to escape with eyes on being reunited with his best friend.
Fallout fans will recognise the name ‘Dogmeat’ anywhere, and those who have never played the series will know it from Walton Goggins’ Ghoul, referring to the dog he saves in the TV series as being bestowed with the moniker, which comes directly from A Boy and His Dog. Beyond the similarities in setting, the creators behind the game world have been open in admitting its influence.
“A Boy and His Dog inspired Fallout on many levels, from underground communities of survivors to glowing mutants,” programmer and designer Jesse Heinig told The Escapist before naming the fellow designer who cribbed even heavier from the movie. “My understanding is that Scott Bennie settled on the name ‘Dogmeat’ for the character, and it’s likely that he did pick that from the story in question.”
Paying tribute has carried right through to the recent blockbuster-sized show, with flashbacks revealing Goggins’ actor character Cooper Howard once starred in an in-universe feature alongside his own four-legged friend before the bombs fell, which was not-so-subtly called A Man and His Dog.
The first Fallout game was released in 1997, and almost three decades later, the franchise continues to nod towards one of its biggest influences, underlining just how big an impact it had on what was first a best-selling string of games before becoming a hit series.
