The beginning of The Road Warrior shows, IIRC, a series of bombs exploding.
The end of Thunderdome has the gyro-pilot fly the feral kids into the lovely, semi-populated ruins of Sydney.
it would be so much more realistic if the bad guys were driving VW Golf and Vespa scooters.
Just a bit of neat trivial- what has been termed the “Poxie Clips” here is actually phrased “the Pox Eclipse” in the novelization. I always thought “Pox Eclipse” was a cool misphrasing of “Apocalypse”.
Yeah, I think they’re at different (if close) points in history more than different universes.
I also think Costner’s Postman could be in the same universe.
I used to think the movie version of Fight Club was in the same universe, but I now suspect Fight Club is meant to be a more optimistic timeline.
I like to think of the Max Max Universe as a Classical version of how the West was lost, and what it got us. It isn’t about humans descending to apehood, but there are certainly a lot of gibbons running around.
The first film, as mentioned, is immediately pre-collapse: There is central authority, there is actual organized law enforcement, the gangs are still gangs and not de facto governments, and the unpopulated regions are the less attractive parts of Australia which have always been sparsely populated. However, it’s worse than our world, because the economy is on a long, terminal collapse due to resource problems, oil being the one everyone focuses on. (Of course. It was the OPEC Earth Day EPA 1970s.) First World countries are now closer to what we’d think of as a Third World lifestyle, where keeping it together in the cities is a big achievement. (How close this is to the actual Third World is best left undiscussed.)
Due to the poverty, the gangs have gotten bolder and the authority is resorting to rather extreme methods to keep some order on the roads. The V8 Interceptors, of which Max gets the Last Of, are an example of this: Fully-functional governments don’t need to engage in desperate all-out chases with insane bandits. Not even the LAPD does that very much. Why? Because functional governments know that there aren’t any refuges for the bandits, no safe houses safe from the law, no boltholes to which people can bolt and be free. In Mad Max Australia, however, the authority isn’t as sure about that, and thus we get the chase the film starts off with.
By the second film, things have collapsed permanently. The foederati, as represented by Lord Humungus, have gone full Goth and are establishing their claims as the legitimate heirs without hairs in a bald power play. At this point, any government more legitimate than Humungus is no more powerful than he is, and the cities are little better than the wastelands. In this world, however, there is little evidence of a Byzantine equivalent; the nuclear war seems to preclude it. However, it does seem to work in continuity with the first film, assuming a rather pessimistic view of how society would change.
The third film doesn’t seem to work in continuity: It’s only twenty years since the first film, when everything was still mostly-functional if a bit faded and rough around the edges, but people are already holding Thunderdomes and there’s a fairly long-established colony of semi-feral children in a cave with their own mythology and ritual. It’s just… rushed. South Park did a wonderful send-up of the whole concept with their episode The Wacky Molestation Adventure.