Just watched "Mad Max' and "The Road Warrior" this afternoon- GOD, what classic movies! When I was a senior in High School, Mad Max and its sequel were two of my favorite movies, and even today they're still in my top 40 movies of all time! Though I first taped it off the Television, I soon owned copies of it on Beta, later VHS, and later even Laserdisc, luckily for my viewing pleasure, I've now got both of 'em on DVD!
I'd actually seen The Road Warrior BEFORE Mad Max- It was shown on Television one night, and as a high school student who had recently become a huge fan of the Sci-Fi Fantasy magazine HEAVY METAL, this Post-Apocalyptic Masterpiece seemed liked the epics storylines I was reading coming straight to life in vibrant, bloody, gory colors!
This epic battle between the white-robed “good guys” (looking like Bethlehemic devout worshippers):
...and the “bad guys” (looking like Zulu steampunk tribesmen) over the gasoline of the world was like seeing "Star Wars" again for the first time- this imaginative take of the dystopian future of our society rocked my world!
I mean, crap, the visuals ALONE could have been taken straight out of the Science Fiction stories I read- (just look at how picturesque and stimulating these scenes are!) -Add together the story of Max's rise out of the ashes to a more heroic redemption through helping those in need, and you've got a movie of EPIC proportions!
The Road Warrior's look was
reminiscent of the cult classic David Carradine movie Deathrace2000, artistic and mysterious "cars of death" figure strongly in BOTH flicks, and they both even featured cult fave Mary “Eating Raoul” Woronov as super-cool warrior chicks!
The climax of the movie is, of course, the famous scene where Max drives the gasoline tanker out of the city and is set upon by the punk Vultures who have to stop him at any cost, and my GOSH, did this BLOW ME AWAY! One of the most visually dynamic and engaging scenes EVER, I was on the edge of my seat and holding my breath til it was all over! When I ended I remember looking around the living room screaming HOLY CRAP THAT WAS AWESOME!!!!
I was fortunate to have had the VHS recorder running on that one, so I was able to watch it over and over, and the more I watched and rewatched that movie, the more intrigued I became to see the "origin" of Max, and so off to the Video Rental store I went, to FINALLY see the original MAD MAX movie!
I thought Mad Max would be as bizarre and abstract as Road Warrior, but what I got was a more down-to-earth toned film, with the family man Max living his life with wife and child, caring workmates and best friends.
Though I'd already heard the story from the opening of "Road Warrior", I was fascinated to realize that this humble, soft spoken man:
...would become this dusty, detached loner in subsequent flicks:
But as you watched the movie, you saw how this man named Max, working for the futuristic MFP force, clashed with the motorcycle soldiers of "the Toecutter" til they took everything of joy he had, leaving him with nothing but a burning desire for vengeance.
By the time he's hunted down and killed all the gang members, you see that the man known as Max Rockatansky is gone, transformed forever into the Road Warrior we now know!
In the mid-2000's, they finally got around to releasing both of those classics on DVD, and here's where the confusing times came for me-
ONE: Mad Max was recorded with the ORIGINAL Australian voices, so for the first time, the dialog coming out of the characters' mouths were really "matching" and sounded a lot less "robotic" and more warm! But I gotta say, after 15+ years of watching the movie dubbed, it was JARRING to watch, and quite frankly when I watch it even today, in my head I still hear the "Hollywood" dubbed version! Perhaps I'll never get used to it!
TWO: The opening dialog for The Road Warrior, with an aged "Feral Kid" croaking out the narration, was SO DIFFERENT from the television dubbed copy I had! The timing and flavor was SO weird...truthfully, I REALLY don't like the version on the DVD and WISH I could get a copy with the Television Version dialog!!!
Ah, so much problems with the Post-Apocalytic Society going digital, I tell ya....
