BW Media Spotlight

This seems to be the week were I spend too much time talking about things I haven’t watched or read because someone said something stupid. So for the record…I have not watched Amazon Prime’s Fallout, nor have I played the games because only post-apocalypse story I ever enjoyed was Thundarr The Barbarian. The games may be good, and given their reputation probably are. The show may be good, and an article I’ll be pointing to later even says it’s one of Amazon Prime’s better adaptations.

That’s faint praise, mind you. Between Tolkien, the Wheel Of Time series, and grabbing the abandoned Batman cartoon that seems to treat adaptation as a way to use branding to push their own stories or “do it better than the original”, a foolish notion often shared with Netflix and their approach to live-action adaptations of anime. So any accuracy at this point is probably going to get praise from the fanbase. However, while a one-to-one adaptation between formats is nearly impossible, especially from a first person interactive experience like the Fallout games, there are still rules to follow, and while it sounds like they hit more targets than normal, I’ve also heard complaints about the flaws in the series as a narrative as well as an adaptation.

The first article we’re examining comes from the Fallout showrunners being interviewed about their show. In it they’re asked about adapting a video game to television, and they made a few of the same errors made when discussing the Twisted Metal adaptation that was apparently less faithful to the source material, another property I know nothing about but was able to research pretty easily, unlike the showrunners. So remember, I’m not judging the show on any level. I’m only looking at what the showrunners said about the loose parts of the adaptations and going “well actually…”, so if you’re turned off by that I have better articles here for you to check out. Or if you just want to know what they said, keep reading.

Continue reading →