The Mad Max franchise has pitted its titular antihero against a slew of villains to mixed effect, and each of them had a hand in inspiring Fury Road’s Immortan Joe and his War Boys. Beginning in 1979 with the sparse, intense revenge thriller Mad Max, the franchise has since seen director George Miller offer up progressively more ambitious visions of a devastated post-apocalyptic future. The series depicts the lives of desperate scavengers struggling to survive this harsh new world, all through the eyes of the eponymous antihero.
The franchise may have begun fairly grounded, with the original Mad Max only being set in the future to save on the cost of locations. Over time, the stories of each Mad Max sequel have grown more outlandish and over-the-top while still holding onto the canny social commentary of the original. The progression of the franchise's themes can be charted by looking back on its many villains and seeing the part each had to play in forming the persona of Fury Road’s Immortan Joe and his War Boys.
From the terrifying Toecutter to the comparatively benign Aunt Entity, each Mad Max villain provided part of the character, tactics, and outlook of Immortan Joe and his cult of zealous followers. The Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome, and the first film's critiques of authoritarian societies, the militarization of the police, far-right ideologues, and future environmental destruction come together in Immortan Joe, an unforgettable villain who epitomizes the overarching themes of Mad Max. A scarier, stranger, and more memorable distillation of his predecessors’ collective traits, Immortan Joe thus became the strongest antagonist Mad Max has faced so far.
Rictus Erectus Was Inspired By Road Warrior’s Wez
The always-threatening Nathan Jones put in a spirited, near-mute performance as Immortan Joe’s henchman and son Rictus Erectus, and he’s an imposing onscreen presence. However, a lack of screen time and almost no dialogue means the character has little chance to make an impression, making his bizarre, nearly-nude appearance a striking character detail that distinguishes him from the rest of the War Boys. In both costume and attitude, Fury Road’s endlessly loyal underdressed henchman owes an obvious debt to The Road Warrior’s earlier unhinged sycophant, Wez. The Road Warrior’s henchman is more romantically attached to Lord Humungus whereas his Fury Road counterpart’s slavish devotion to Joe is paternal, allowing the series to critique excessive devotion to authority via a memorably weird character without leaving any unfortunate homophobic interpretations on the table.
Aunt Entity Inspired The Citadel’s Society
The Citadel is clearly a misogynistic, nightmarish hellscape, but it is an ethos. While Immortan Joe’s city despises and mistreats women and the starving masses, the fact it has a clear society and power structure (however barbaric) owes its inspiration to the similarly ambitious (if more benevolent) attempts Aunt Entity made to recreate a functioning society in Beyond Thunderdome. In contrast with the chaotic warlords of The Road Warrior’s desolate setting, Tina Turner’s Aunt Entity is the most measured and stable main antagonist in the series. Turner, who puts in a solid, campy turn, ensures the morally ambiguous Aunt Entity is a not-all-that-good, not-all-that-bad anti-villain compared to the monsters who preceded her. Fury Road takes the pseudo-society she built and asks what that sort of power would result in if wielded by a less benevolent benefactor.
Lord Humungus Inspired Immortan Joe’s (Abuse of) Authority
The Road Warrior’s lead villain is a more rounded, resonant antagonist than the first film’s biker gang leader Toecutter. His attempts to build a dystopian society around might and cruelty make for a more interesting social commentary than the first film’s comparatively typical baddies. Originally intended to be a former cop (and, in a devastating twist, Max's now-unhinged former partner), The Road Warrior’s Lord Humungus is a clear inspiration for Immortan Joe (a former military general) claiming to be a moral authority over civilians of the wasteland and giving himself an impressive honorific when in reality, he's another bullying tyrant. However, once again this character builds on the earlier villain by giving Immortan Joe a more stable civilization to lead, making it more believable the struggling masses of the Citadel would be afraid of his power. The Road Warrior’s villain is, for all his bluster, aware he is an opportunist exploiting desperate people for his own gain, whereas the Fury Road villain truly believes his hype, even if the ending may prove Immortan Joe is very much mortal.
Toecutter Gave Immortan Joe His Actor (& Accent)
Finally, Mad Max’s original bad guy - and still one of the best marriages of goofy, over-the-top villainy with a sense of genuinely unhinged menace - gave the most obvious and direct inspiration to Immortan Joe decades after his screen debut. Series star Hugh Keays-Byrne gained the role of Immortan Joe thanks to his unforgettable turn as Toecutter in the original Mad Max, and the actor brought with him a strange technique that made the earlier villain so memorable. The bizarre, ever-changing accent he used as both Toecutter and Immortan Joe makes it hard to place the character’s origins and makes the figure feel more unhinged.
It is something Keays-Byrne had used to make Toecutter stand out in Mad Max (which was tragically lost in translation by an American dub that removed his bizarre articulations). It makes more thematic sense in Fury Road, where the inability to pin down Immortan Joe’s accent reinforces the idea that a fascist strongman can crop up in any country or region, given the right societal conditions. Unlike his original Mad Max performance, in Fury Road Keays-Byrne constantly switching his accent is not only an ingenious decision by the actor. Like Beyond Thunderdome’s discussion of social structure, The Road Warrior’s depiction of abusive authority, or Rictus’ inspiration in Wez, it is an element from an earlier movie that Fury Road uses to reinforce and distill the recurring thematic preoccupations of the Mad Max franchise as a whole.
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How Every Earlier Mad Max Villain Influenced Immortan Joe and The War Boys - Screen Rant
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