Fallout 3: Chicken Licken [Random Madness]

I saw this clever advert on TV recently for Chicken Licken – a local restaurant and takeout chain.

It involved a family who in 1994, decided that because of the fears surrounding the upcoming election at the time and the changing of the guard from one government to the the other, along with the end of apartheid and the beginning of democracy (look up South African history to find out more), that it would be safer to move out of their house… and move underground; exactly underneath the plot in a bunker or vault of sorts.
They lived there for the next sixteen years, living off of nothing but canned food until one day, the father in the family got sick and tired of the living conditions and left to go topside – the first time in over a decade and a half.

After a few days, the son, now grown up and a young adult, decided that his father had been away for too long. Fearing the worst, he packed his bags and went up onto the surface himself to try and track his father down.

A family who has been underground might expect the world to be a very different place – and it was. As the son emerged from the depths of the underground, he found himself in… a Chicken Licken restaurant. The place had been built where the old house used to be.
After looking around in awe for awhile, he locked eyes with his father who was sitting down at one of the tables, hogging out on loads of chicken pieces, after having to put up with viennas and canned spam for a long time.

“Pa?” the son uttered.

The father stopped chewing ravenously for a short while to say, “Se vir ma ek’s nou daar.” (Tell mom I’ll be there now).

It was one of the more amusing ads on TV, but it took a few showings for me to make connections. It’s obvious that the story here and the one in Fallout 3 are quite similar; apart from the time frame and the conditions which lead to the father leaving. But it did involve living in a vault, with the father leaving after a time, and the son following him.

Of course in Fallout 3 the player character had never been to the surface until the day he went looking for his dad, James, whereas the son nicknamed “Boetie” in the ad was born on the surface but left with his family to move into the vault at about the age of three or four. When he emerged however in 2010, he was about the same age as the player character in Fallout 3: nineteen.

Coincidence? Interesting, nonetheless.

Fallout 3: Chicken Licken [Random Madness]