Heid the Ba' wrote:They do sort of answer some of these questions, there are a cluster of settlements one of which has an aquifer water supply and produces food, another an oil refinery and one called something like "Bullet-town". Vehicles are pre-1980 so have no electronics etc., but they do have rubber tyres . . . But yes, it doesn't make much sense.
I think it was "Barter Town", wasn't it?
The first
Mad Max film was pretty low budget, so they didn't actually create a real apocalyptic event and see how well people were able to cope with it. By the time it got to the Tina Turner/Hollywood phase, maybe they could have down that. And maybe that has something to do with the dramatic decline of the level of civilisation from the first to the third films; in the first, Australia just looked a bit eastern European. By the third, it was looking pretty neolithic, albeit with dwellers who had some left-over toys from a more advanced civilisation. I don't think the nature of the apocalyptic event was really mentioned until the third film, when one of the Barter-town dwellers tries to sell Mad Max some radioactive water, suggesting that perhaps that the Australian nuclear weapons arsenal had been used.
Even in the first film, the Toecutter's gang robbed a petrol lorry, suggesting perhaps that fuel was in scarce supply. (But, then again, in the US, people steal copper pipe, and I'm not sure that there's any severe copper shortage; they just want to make some money reselling it.) In the second film, the little colony out in the Outback was somehow manufacturing fuel, which the Lord Humungus's gang was determined to steal (and quite willing to kill for, although they might have been willing to kill just for the entertainment value). Bruce Spence would leave his gyrocopter parked on the side of the roadway, so curious by-passers would stop, and be bitten by his poisonous snake. He would then steal the fuel from their cars (or maybe the cars themselves). However, Max was a little too fast for his snake.
So fuel for sure seemed to be very much on the minds of the inhabitants of the Mad Max universe.