Mad Max Timeline PART 1 - Original Trilogy

hello and welcome today I'd like to tell you about the timeline of Mad Max movies [Music] frankly I'm making this video because I've seen too many people claiming that Mad Max movies do not have a solid timeline and that there is no continuity between them and all of the movies are just completely separate that is simply not the case and as you'll later find out there is even a timeline connection between the original trilogy and fury road but in order to understand it we had to start with the first movie in the series Mad Max released in 1979 the movie doesn't give us a lot of backstory in fact it doesn't give us anything except a short line a few years from now so when does that movie take place and what's the backstory well to understand all of this we need to see how the movie was made you see Mad Max was not supposed to be a sci-fi movie set in a dystopian future at all in fact Mad Max started off as a journalist in contemporary Melbourne originally the idea was to make a movie about a journalist going from one place of accident to another and in the process of doing so he would lose his humanity empathy and you know he would become a shell of a man but any longer out on that road and on one of them you know a terminal crazy and that idea came from George Miller's own experience as a young doctor observing seasoned doctors that were desensitized from years of working in profession Miller just simply thought what would happen if it actually happened to you and also what would it take to push that person over the edge and so he created the early version of Mad Max the movie was supposed to take place in contemporary Melbourne in 1970s this was a privately financed movie and Miller and Kennedy just didn't have a lot of money at all they wouldn't be able to afford to film in busy streets and buildings and they wouldn't be able to pay for extras and get all the permissions so to cut costs they decided to film in abandoned buildings you know outskirts of Melbourne and back streets where grass would grow through the cracks in the pavement on top of that Miller and Kennedy were collecting crazy stories from their work as a doctor ambulance Duo and they wanted to include that in the script too but turns out that the stories turned the script into some sort of crazed hyper version of reality also George Miller just couldn't justify why Max's friends and family would die since he was just a journalist so he decided to change the profession of the main character to a police officer you know a reasonable choice given that families of police officers might get targeted by gangster the movie was changing shape dramatically and Miller decided to give in and simply set the movie in the near dystopian future just doesn't I don't believe it would be happening the contemporary world let's let's exaggerate let's sit a little bit in the future okay but when exactly in the future well there are some clues in the movie the first one is right at the very beginning you know it says a few years from now at the time of making Mad Max in 1977 this would have meant that Mad Max takes place somewhere in the 80s somewhere in the mid 80s probably but there's more if you look closely there's a date on one of the signs in the movie and it says December 6 1984 and it's written on the highway 9 sector 26 sign and that's not even all the mfp sign hanging on the halls of justice also has a date on it it says establish 1983 even though it's not visible in the movie but the actual prop used in the movie shows exactly that year ok so now we can assume that Mad Max takes place in the mid 80s but what about the backstory would happen to the world well there is no backstory really at the time of writing Mad Max the movie was supposed to be a contemporary movie so they really didn't give it any kind of special backstory at all however the creators were directly inspired by the 1973 oil crisis that reached Australia and this was a real event which George Miller and Byron Kennedy saw with their own eyes and they saw what fuel shortage did to the society and how quickly people turn against each other I remember very well that there was big restriction in Melbourne and there are only a few petrol stations where only emergency services nurses and ambulance drivers please could get get get petrol and in such a sedate calm City as Melbourne it took 10 days before the first shot was fired and I wondered what would happen if it was 10 years and so they used that real event as an inspiration for the fuel shortage in anarchy and Mad Max but other than that there was really no backstory or world building so to conclude Mad Max takes place in the mid-1980s and it doesn't really have a backstory because it was originally supposed to be a contemporary movie okay so let's mark that on the timeline and move on to Mad Max 2 aka the road warrior Mad Max became a success and Miller noticed that people from different countries recognized Max as a mythological character for the Japanese max was similar to a samurai and in Nordic countries he was compared to heroes from bat mythology and the French for example saw max sort of like a character from a Western this made Milla research mythological characters and so he read a book entitled the hero with a thousand faces by Joseph Campbell in that book Joseph Campbell outlined the character arc of a hero and this is very important because Miller would then consciously use that knowledge and turn max into this sort of wandering mythological hero who's remembered through campfire stories and all of the following Mad Max movies another thing that Muller wanted to change was the visual language of the movie he would often quote Alfred Hitchcock who said Alfred Hitchcock had a great saying I try to make films where they don't have to read the subtitles in Japan and so he wanted a new Mad Max movie to be a very visual experience without a lot of dialogue but in order to show that dystopian world to the audience and make them understand it without giving them barely any exposition Miller had to lay down some serious foundation on top of which you would build that dystopian world from the ground up or in other words he needed a detailed backstory for not only Mad Max 2 but for the first Mad Max as well and here is where the series backstory writing began meet Terry Hays the guy responsible for writing Mad Max novelization Miller really liked that novelization and so he hired Terry Hayes to help him write the script for Mad Max - Terry Hayes understood that in order to create a convincing dystopian world of Mad Max 2 you have to base that backstory in reality and also he would have to fill in the back story for the first movie so what inspired Terry Hayes to ride that back sorry well a little experiment he did when he was working as a radio producer he would put in fake news about a war breaking out in the Middle East in an actual real broadcast and people listening to the radio were not aware that this was fake and it caused quite a bit of panic and this little fake news segment became the origin of the backstory for both Mad Max and Mad Max ooh and I told him about my experience on the radio program he said let's do it let's do it let's say that's how the world ended the backstory was based on a real event again this was an oil crisis but this time around it was the 1979 oil crisis and that was when real tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran took place in the real world those tensions ended peacefully but in Terry Hayes's alternate reality they led to a war between Iran and Saudi Arabia which left all of the oil fields in the Middle East on fire with that one event Terry Hayes explained the lack of fuel in the world and the rest was just a downward spiral all across the globe which he explained in detail in a production document called the preamble in that document it was outlined that after the war between Saudi Arabia and Iran all of the countries in the world couldn't function without fuel the UN was called to do something about it but nothing could stop the avalanche there were martial laws in Italy in Germany and people went out on the streets and government started to collapse and their City communications stopped and whatever fuel convoys were left were ambushed and attacked by biker gangs and that's when the main force patrol was founded in Australia in 1983 as the last-ditch attempt to uphold the law on the roads the events of Mad Max taking place in the mid-80s were the final days of the mfp just before the complete collapse of the society as we know it so what happened between Mad Max and Mad Max - well things got worse electricity went out food became scarce banks and power plants got closed mfp was disbanded many officers went grow and ordinary people started to prey on each other for resources until was just too dangerous to live in the cities altogether so they fled out into the outback where they would have to realm for resources and they would use homemade buggies modified bikes and cars to hunt alone and later banned into gangs and people from different paths of life would end up in those gangs people like X police officers ex-military punks and skinheads all of which capable enough to survive and they would often be banded together under the rule of one leader others would pack everything up and just leave a sign of which you can see at the very beginning of Mad Max 2 just look at the rig max stumbles upon I mean the trailer is full of household items plates furniture it's possible that this rig was part of a bigger convoy that left the city but it was just not fit for the wasteland the gun down cars we see right before that look very normal as well they also have household items in them so they were probably part of that same convoy maybe they were going to the compound who knows and speaking of which Pappagallo was a CEO of the Seven Sisters petroleum an oil company gone bankrupt just as everyone else he left the city but he took the maps to the oil compound with him a place where him and others would have the chance to start over again now as for max he wandered into the wasteland too but you know he lost everything he got and after the events of Mad Max he became a shell of a man now Mad Max 2 takes place just three years after the first movie it's also very important to mention that Mad Max 2 does not take place after a nuclear holocaust George Miller specifically stated that he did not want to set Mad Max 2 in a post nuclear environment because it would create a lot of problems for the script you know fallout radiation disease and lack of food and vegetation poisoned water and a completely barren landscape those are the reasons Mad Max 2 is not post nuclear in fact it takes place in the final stages of decay of the society however Terry Hays did not rule out the possibility of a limited nuclear exchange happening elsewhere in the world in the northern hemisphere perhaps but did it happen though well it was never explicitly stated for the south or hemisphere however and specifically Australia the first two Mad Max movies do not take place after any kind of a nuclear attack so let's look at the dates again it's pretty straightforward so far Mad Max takes place in the mid 80s Mad Max 2 takes place three years after that which means Mad Max 2 takes place in the late 80s and if we stretch it we could assume that it takes place in the 1990 just for simplicity's sake and this round number would actually be helpful because some more dates will come up later on enter Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome now Matt banks Beyond Thunderdome takes place fifteen years after Mad Max 2 which would mean that it takes place in 2005 roughly max is about 40 years old and in the movie we find out that there was a nuclear apocalypse unfortunately I wasn't able to get a detailed production document showing what happened between Mad Max 2 and Beyond Thunderdome although I'm 100% sure that that detailed backstory exists because Miller absolutely needs it to build the worlds we see in those movies but since we don't know when the nuclear strike happened we're gonna have to listen to those kids covered in clay and see what they have to say stop the noise that's not the noise according to the kids in the crack in the earth aka you know the waiting ones with rising ones it all started with the pox Eclipse full of pain clearly they mean the nuclear holocaust but since we know that it didn't happen before Mad Max and Mad Max soo it must have happened after those two movies now this is when their story gets a little weird let's assume the nuclear apocalypse happened and the nuclear winter came and then they say Captain Walker took the people on the plane and crashed the plane so that must mean they somehow survived a nuclear attack and managed to get enough fuel and a working plane only to get up in the air and crash it in the desert there's no way of arguing that story because this is the only one we've got so let's just assume that's what happened although frankly it just sounds kind of ridiculous so the plane crashed the survivor settled in the crack in the earth and started to you know you know rebuild civilization if you know what I mean I mean okay then they made babies alright and the eldest kid we see in Beyond Thunderdome is sivanna who's supposed to be 16 years old so let's do the math Beyond Thunderdome takes place 15 years after Mad Max to Savannah is 16 that must mean that Savannah was born around the time of Mad Max ooh which was pre nuclear holocaust but also Savannah was too young to remember the nuclear holocaust in the plane crash which would mean that all of it happened shortly after Mad Max ooh now let's look at the dates the message we see on the wall and the crack in the earth shows a date when Captain Walker left with a search party again the date is obscured but we can see that they left that place on September 10 1990s we don't know since Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome takes place in 2005 and adults left some time in the mid 90s we can assume that the kids were there without adult supervision for about ten years and at least according to what we see in the movie which always made me wonder what kind of adults would leave all the kids to fend for themselves after all the kids said that there was this one big search party and they left and that was that but wait that's not what really happened although in the movie we find now that Captain Walker left that place with others the original version of the script reveals that Captain Walker's search party was only the first one after that there was a second one slightly smaller group of people and they never came back either and then there was even a smaller third group and a fourth group with just a couple of people and finally the fifth search party which consisted of just one the eldest person of the tribe Savannah she was the designated search party in that movie following in the tradition of Captain Walker and now you know what she was doing out in the desert and why she was so happy she found max thinking that's Captain Walker who promised to come back they really thought it was Captain Walker after so many years of people going in search of him and the civilization it kind of helps you to understand why those kids act in such strange ways unfortunately in the final movie the whole plot wasn't fleshed out enough for us to understand and so that plot with the kids just gets a lot of flack so let's round it up first we have the war between Saudi Arabia and Iran possibly the war started in 1979 just like in the real world it would have then the world collapses mfp is established in 1983 in Australia and then Mad Max takes place somewhere in the mid 80s after that people flee the cities and start roaming the outback then they form gangs and Mad Max 2 takes place three years after Mad Max in late 80s or in 1990 if we want to keep it simple nuclear apocalypse happens shortly after Mad Max 2 sometime in the mid 90s Captain Walker leaves the crack in the earth and Beyond Thunderdome takes place in 2005 which is 15 years after Mad Max 2 so having said all of that there's a reason why Miller builds those huge back stories but never reveals them he simply wants people to be guessing and you know it makes those movies that much more compelling which doesn't change the fact that in order to convey his visual style properly he has to come up with solid backstories for everything and believing what I've explained here is just the tip of the iceberg and Miller has backstories for all the characters in the movies and his obsession with world building peaked with fury road where so much additional material was written that two additional Mad Max scripts were written as a byproduct it's just that he doesn't want us to see any of it and he puts it all through this mythology grinder and further blurs the clarity with third-person storytelling which leaves a lot of leeway in a room for any kind of interpretation that's what makes people come up with crazy theories about those movies but you know truth be told there is a continuity to all those movies even between the original trilogy and fury road which I'll discuss in the next video so stay tuned and wait for my next video where I'll be discussing exactly that

Channel: Mad Max Bible

Views: 919,861

Rating: 4.8777733 out of 5

Keywords: mad max, timeline, chronology, dates, mel gibson, george miller, road warrior, thunderdome, beyond, dystopian, post apocalypse, fury road trailer, mad max ps4, mad max gameplay, mad max fury road full movie, tom hardy, fury road, mad max 2

Id: Sv5ZGi_Pn5M

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Max_Rockatanski]

Just a reminder about this video because Part 2 is coming soon!

[u/sweetpapisanchez]

Glad to see it on youtube!

[u/DJ_Amish]

Awesome video. Looking forward to seeing part two. Once again the third part of the trilogy is the red headed stepchild.

[u/bhlob]

I don't get why people care so much about the timeline and continuity of the movies, george miller clearly doesn't