50 Fun Facts About Mad Max 2: the Road Warrior

Brian May scored Mad Max 2, but he is not the Brian May who plays guitar in which rock band?

Queen has its own Brian May, an English guitarist with no link to the film. The Mad Max 2 composer was an Adelaide-born conductor who also scored the first Mad Max.

Mel Gibson moved to Sydney at age 12 and found fame in Mad Max 2, but in which country was he born?

The United States is his birthplace: he was born in Peekskill, New York, before his family emigrated. The Road Warrior then became his first hit back in America.

Which profession did Mad Max 2 director George Miller practise for several years before making films?

Doctor was his first career: Miller trained in medicine in Sydney and worked as a physician. He named Max Rockatansky after Carl von Rokitansky, a pioneering pathologist.

Which animated film about penguins won an Academy Award for George Miller, the director of Mad Max 2?

Happy Feet won Miller the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, a long way from the wasteland. He also produced and co-wrote the talking-pig hit Babe.

What kind of face covering hides the features of the marauders' hulking leader in The Road Warrior?

A hockey mask hides his face, months before Jason Voorhees first wore one in Friday the 13th Part III. Above it, his bald, stitched scalp stays on show.

What is really inside the tanker that Max drives through the final chase of Mad Max 2?

Sand pours out of the wrecked tanker, which was a decoy all along. The settlers had hidden the real fuel in drums inside their other vehicles.

Hawk and Animal took their name, face paint and spiked armor from The Road Warrior to star in what?

Pro wrestling made stars of the Road Warriors, a tag team later billed as the Legion of Doom. They were among the first wrestlers to bring a movie theme into the ring.

Max's loyal dog in Mad Max 2 inspired Dogmeat, a four-legged companion in which video game series?

Fallout gave players Dogmeat after its art director kept the film running in his office. In Fallout 2, a man named Mel appears to avenge the dog if a player kills him.

Which music star ruled Bartertown in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the follow-up to Mad Max 2?

Tina Turner played Aunty Entity, the ruthless ruler of Bartertown. The third film was also Mel Gibson's last outing as Max.

Vernon Wells, the mohawked biker of Mad Max 2, fought Arnold Schwarzenegger as Bennett in which film?

Commando gave him his best-known Hollywood role, the villain Bennett. Wells had worked in a quarry and played in rock bands before he took up acting.

What weapon does the growling wild boy of Mad Max 2 hurl at the marauders?

A metal boomerang is his weapon, and an early throw kills the companion of the mohawked biker. That grudge is why the biker keeps lunging at the boy in the final chase.

Which British actor replaced Mel Gibson as Max when the series returned with Mad Max: Fury Road?

Tom Hardy took over the role in 2015, thirty years after Gibson last played it. Fury Road went on to win six Academy Awards.

What was Max's job before the world fell apart, as footage from the first film recalls in Mad Max 2?

A police officer on highway duty, he quit after a biker gang killed his family and then hunted the gang down. The patched leathers he still wears are his old uniform.

Which firearm does Max carry through the wasteland in both Mad Max 2 and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?

A sawn-off shotgun is his weapon of choice in both films. In the third he has to hand it over, with the rest of his arsenal, to enter Bartertown.

What kind of facility have the settlers fortified against the marauders' daily attacks in Mad Max 2?

An oil refinery is their fortress, still producing fuel in a world that has run dry. The set was built among the Pinnacles, stony outcrops in the New South Wales outback.

Which lanky actor played the Gyro Captain in Mad Max 2 and later the Mouth of Sauron?

Bruce Spence, who stands 2.01 metres tall, played the scavenging pilot. He came back in the third film as a different flyer, Jedediah.

Which Japanese director, famed for samurai epics, was among George Miller's inspirations for Mad Max 2?

Akira Kurosawa was an influence on the script, and it showed. The Washington Post's review likened Miller to Kurosawa, Peckinpah and Leone.

Virginia Hey, Mad Max 2's Warrior Woman, later played a blue-skinned alien priestess in which series?

Farscape cast her as Zhaan, a part that meant shaving her head and eyebrows. Years earlier she had appeared on Top of the Pops with The Buggles.

Dean Semler, who shot the desert chases of Mad Max 2, later won an Oscar for filming which western?

Dances with Wolves won him the Academy Award for Best Cinematography. He also shot Waterworld, whose co-writer called Mad Max 2 a major inspiration.

In the prologue of Mad Max 2, what kind of catastrophe has left the world fighting over petrol?

A global war choked off the oil and toppled governments, the narrator explains. The first film had shown a society that was only starting to break down.

What title and name does the marauders' muscle-bound warlord go by in Mad Max 2?

Lord Humungus was pictured by George Miller as a badly burned former soldier. Miller even thought he might once have served alongside the settlers' leader.

Which mohawked biker from Mad Max 2 did Empire magazine name the greatest movie henchman of all time?

Wez topped Empire's list in 2011. George Miller saw the snarling biker and Max as near mirror images of each other.

What is the name of the idealistic leader of the settlers, played by Mike Preston, in Mad Max 2?

Pappagallo gets a past in the film's novelisation: a top oil-company executive who lost his family and fled to the wasteland. He dies during the final chase.

Which Mad Max 2 character turns out to be the narrator, looking back on Max as an old man?

The Feral Kid, who only growls on screen, grows up to be chief of his people and tells the story. His adult voice belongs to the actor Harold Baigent.

Which herding breed, also called the cattle dog, is Max's only companion in Mad Max 2?

Blue heeler is the nickname of the Australian Cattle Dog, and the film simply calls him Dog. He saves Max by turning the tables when the Gyro Captain springs an ambush.

Which animal does Max snatch barehanded before it can bite him in The Road Warrior?

A snake strikes at him and he simply catches it. His reflexes are tested again in Fury Road by a two-headed lizard, which he stamps on.

Which gas gives the marauder leader's vehicle its bursts of speed in Mad Max 2?

Nitrous oxide lets the mohawked biker, borrowing his leader's car, catch Max and run him off the road. That wreck is the end of Max's Pursuit Special.

How do the marauders' leader and his mohawked lieutenant both die at the climax of Mad Max 2?

In a head-on collision: the warlord's car slams into Max's tanker while the biker is fighting Max. The surviving marauders give up the chase soon after.

What does Max wear on his left leg in Mad Max 2, the legacy of a gunshot in the first film?

A knee brace helps him walk after the shot that blew out his left knee. The brace turns up again decades later in Fury Road.

Max's black Pursuit Special, wrecked in Mad Max 2, is a modified version of which Australian muscle car?

The Ford Falcon in question was a 1973 XB GT hardtop. A duplicate was built to be rolled and blown up, so the original car survived the shoot.

Which Hollywood studio retitled Mad Max 2 for American cinemas, where few had seen the first film?

It was Warner Bros. that sold it as The Road Warrior, with adverts that never mentioned Max or hinted at a sequel. Many viewers only caught on during the prologue.

Norma Moriceau designed the punk leathers of Mad Max 2 and later dressed which Australian comedy smash?

Crocodile Dundee and its sequel both carried her costumes. Before the wasteland she had designed the costumes for the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.

Which science fiction film beat The Road Warrior to the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation?

Blade Runner took the prize, beating Steven Spielberg's alien blockbuster as well. The Road Warrior competed as a 1982 film, the year it reached American cinemas.

In which John Hughes teen comedy does Vernon Wells send up his mohawked Mad Max 2 biker?

Weird Science has him gatecrash a house party at the head of a gang of mutant bikers. The film's producer, Joel Silver, liked the turn enough to hire him again.

Which rock singer is said to have babysat Arkie Whiteley, the Captain's Girl of Mad Max 2, in New York?

Janis Joplin is said to have minded the infant Arkie at the Hotel Chelsea, where the family was living. Her father was the celebrated painter Brett Whiteley.

Byron Kennedy, George Miller's producer on Mad Max 2, died at 33 in what kind of accident?

A helicopter crash at Warragamba Dam killed him in 1983; he was at the controls himself. The third Mad Max film is dedicated to him.

Which Mel Gibson drama, released months earlier, kept Mad Max 2 from being the top-earning Australian film at home?

Gallipoli had earned slightly more at home earlier in 1981. Mad Max 2 still took double what the first film made in Australia.

At which awards for science fiction, fantasy and horror was Mad Max 2 named Best International Film?

Saturn Awards voters also put it up for five more prizes, including Best Actor for Mel Gibson and Best Director for George Miller. It converted none of those.

At Australia's AFI Awards, Mad Max 2 won the most prizes yet missed a nomination in which category?

Best Film went to Lonely Hearts, and Mad Max 2 was not even on the shortlist. It still left with five awards, including direction, editing and costume design.

Which manga about a wandering martial artist took its ruined-world setting from the Mad Max films?

Fist of the North Star was first sketched with a modern-day setting. Its writer, Buronson, switched to a post-apocalyptic one because the Mad Max films were so popular.

Kjell Nilsson, the marauder leader of Mad Max 2, was an Olympic-class competitor in which sport?

Weightlifting took him to Australia in 1980 to train Swedish athletes for the Moscow Olympics. The actress he married persuaded him to return and look for film work.

What name do the credits give the companion of the mohawked biker, killed early in Mad Max 2?

The Golden Youth is killed by the wild boy's first throw, and the film presents him as the biker's lover. Avenging him drives the biker through the rest of the story.

Which tiny outback village, seen in more than 140 films and adverts, has a Mad Max 2 museum?

Silverton, home to about fifty people, has housed the museum since 2010. Its founders, Adrian and Linda Bennett, built up their collection of props after moving to the village.

Mad Max 2 was shot over twelve winter weeks around which Australian outback mining city?

Broken Hill was the production's base, and its cinema screened each day's footage for the crew into the early hours. The third film moved on to Coober Pedy.

Whose book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, also a model for Star Wars, helped inspire Mad Max 2?

Joseph Campbell searched the world's myths for a single shared pattern, an idea George Lucas had already used. Mad Max 2 is a far more consciously mythic film than the first.

Which Frankie Goes to Hollywood hit took its title from the opening narration of Mad Max 2?

Two Tribes borrows a phrase from the narrator's account of how the old world fell. The single spent nine straight weeks at number one in Britain in 1984.

Which console received a 1990 Mad Max game whose plot was loosely based on Mad Max 2?

Nintendo NES owners got the game from the publisher Mindscape, starting out in Max's Pursuit Special. A planned follow-up lost the licence and came out as Outlander.

Which bone did stuntman Guy Norris break in a motorcycle fall left in the final cut of Mad Max 2?

Femur is the thigh bone, and his snapped when he flew off the bike and his leg struck a car. Norris later ran the stunts on Fury Road, directing more than 150 performers.

Wasteland Weekend, a yearly gathering of fans in Mad Max costume, is held beside which desert?

Mojave Desert dust has hosted the festival in California since 2010, and George Miller sent a video greeting to the first one. Everyone who attends must come in costume.

Which part of Max's face is hurt in the Mad Max 2 car wreck and still damaged in Beyond Thunderdome?

Eye damage from that wreck is still visible in the third film. Unlike most action heroes, Max carries his injuries from one film to the next.