I was so excited. I had gotten it from the library and liked it, now I had my very own copy!
So I get home to watch it and then I realize the terrible truth - the Australian accents have been dubbed over in American. I am devastated.
Who would desecrate a classic like this?
You only now just realized that film distributors and producers are slime? Welcome to the real world.
It was dubbed in its theatrical release. I was unaware the original vocal track was ever available in the US.
The original distributor of the film, which is my guess as to why it did poorly in its original North American run and kicked box office ass in the rest of the world. Also, every single damn DVD or VHS copy released in North America was the dubbed version until 2001! That’s 20 years after The Road Warrior! So, in short, it’s pretty hard to find a VHS copy of it that isn’t dubbed. You’ll need a foreign version for that.
cite for Mad Max video release info.
The DVD I got from the library had the original vocal track
The first time I watched Mad Max was as a freshman in college in 2004. And I remember the voices were definitely the original Australian voices (one of my friends asked, “Why are they British?”) I can’t remember if this was a DVD or a VHS tape. But it was definitely “available in the US.”
Mad Max, by the way, is a fantastic movie. The sequels are not very good, but unfortunately most people just associate all the movies as one big post-apocalyptic movie rather than distinguishing between the setting of Mad Max and the setting of Road Warrior. This is a big mistake, because those two movies are NOT set in the same world. Mad Max is set before the nuclear war.
The society of Mad Max’s rural Australia is not collapsed, it’s just violent and under-policed. There are no outrageous warlords like Humungus and no outlandish ‘post-apocalyptic’ costumes and weird tribes…it’s still more or less “the real world.” There’s a functioning, if shorthanded, police department, and there’s ostensibly a system of government and law in place (remember when Johnny the Boy is escorted out of the police station by his lawyer?) It’s basically a classic Western re-imagined in a not-too-distant Australia.
Road Warrior and subsequent movies are post-apocalyptic movies in every sense - and they are not very good.
Yep, it was, and you can’t much blame the producers for doing it. A tiny release from Australia would need every advantage it could get, and since Americans in 1980 were hardly accustomed to the Australian accent, it was feared that they wouldn’t be able to understand the dialogue.
I remember seeing Monty Python and the Holy Grail in the theater in 1970-something, and my friends and I had to watch it twice to figure out what was being said.
My library is unloading their VHS tapes for a quarter apiece, you might try your library for a bargain.
When you find out, settle it in the Thunder Dome!
Mad Max II is amazing, although as you say, a very different film to its predecessor.
Mad Max II The Road Warrior? An absolutely terrific film - one of my all time favorites. The next one, though, Beyond Thunderdome, was a complete waste of time.
I seem to remember seeing the original Mad Max many years ago, perhaps in the early to mid '80s when I was in college, and it had Australian vocals. Do people really have difficulty understanding Australian and British accents?
Never mind.
I don’t get it.
When you wrote this, did everybody in your country stop and stare for a minute? Its just that its so very very wrong, and people are bound to have noticed.
To be fair, I only saw Road Warrior one time, about five years ago. I don’t remember it very well. I have seen the original Mad Max at least ten times over that same period. I’ll watch it again and re-evaluate my opinion.
Just as a data point, Mad Max was the first movie I ever purchased on VHS, back when I was in high school in the mid 1980s. It seems unbelievable now, but at that time movies on VHS were prohibitively expensive (my dad paid around $80 for Blazing Saddles a year or so before, so that us kids could appreciate the campfire farting scene they always cut out on TV). I saw Mad Max on the shelf at a Venture department store in Topeka, KS for $20 and thought I had stumbled on the deal of the century. Shortly thereafter it seemed the bottom had fallen out of the market and all movies on VHS were suddenly going for about that same price.
Nitpick: Road Warrior is set after societal collapse following a conventional war-related oil shortage, not nuclear war. It says so right in the intro. Nuclear war is only first mentioned in Thunderdome.
It’s an interesting convergence of obsessions, with* Road Warrior *right on the seam. The 70’s were all about fear of crime and the breakdown of civilization from internal factors; the 80’s, with Reagan, SDI and so on were all about fear of nuclear war. MM2 may have come out in 1981, but it was very much a 1970’s film.
Very weird to see someone defending Mad Max 1 over the Road Warrior.
Mad Max I is completely incoherent, on the road it’s Mad Max 2, elsewhere it’s “Neighbours”.
I wouldn’t call Mad Max ‘incoherent’. It just suffered from a low budget and over-acting. (Especially the ‘I am the Night Rider! Ahahahaha!’ guy.) I didn’t see Mad Max until after we got a VCR – in 1984. So I saw the more crudely-made film years after seeing the sequel – and it was dubbed in American. It suffered by comparison. Had I seen the first one first, I would have liked it better; but I liked it well enough.