WMG / Mad Max: Fury Road

Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

The Mad Max represents a mythological figure in the post collapse world

We see a quote from the first history man at the end of the movie. Perhaps like many mythological figures in our world Mad Max is an amalgam of several people and the movies are a representation of the life of this figure. Adding to the mix could also be Max being a monkier at the time for wanderer or traveller, much like Snow is a label for illegitimate children in GOT. This label may have resulted from the first "Max", the one from the first movie.

So several wanderers labelled "Max" become great figures in the world and get amalgamated into a single quintessential, immortal traveller, this process aided by them all possessing the same label of a wanderer. Matti 23

Large Empires/Nations already exist by the time of Fury Road

In ancient times there were large and advanced nations who referred to the surrounding people as "barbarians". Perhaps Mad Max is taking place in one of these "barbarian" regions and there are relatively more advanced and stable nations in the wasteland. So Immortan Joe's Empire isn't the remnants of civilization but a "barbarian" horde living on the outskirts of a cluster of larger nations. Kind of like the people of Northern Europe compared to the ancient Mediterranean civilizations.

• Considering there's a moment in the movie where a satellite may have been spotted, perhaps there's still some modern or almost-modern civilization (or at least something technologically on the level of The Walking Dead sans zombies and with less psychopaths) rebuilding on other parts of the planet. The "Mad Max" stories take place in the Australian Outback. Just because Australia had become some primitive, punk-rock, BDSM-flavored Frank Frazetta painting doesn't mean the whole planet is like that.
• Max's old police force may have founded their own Empire. They may have been strapped for resources but those in the wasteland are probably feeling the shortages worse.

The Dreadnought from Death Race is a precursor to Immortan Joe's War Rigs

Perhaps Death Race is in a pre collapse world and afterwards these somehow manage to get into the hands of Immortan Joe. More could have been constructed after the loss of the original and Immortan Joe could have captured them. They may have lost functions due to years of battle damage, a lack of resources or perhaps that is what the replacement Dreadnoughts always looked like.

https://youtu.be/pZBcVl5so4M

Max is the Feral Child from The Road Warrior

Which goes a long way to explaining Max's different actor, past, and age. The Feral Child took Max's identity as an adult only to get traumatized horribly by his attempts at being a hero. Then he actually becomes one.

• The only problem with this is that the Feral Kid is the (obviously elderly) Narrator of The Road Warrior, and at the end he tells us they found somewhere to live, and he eventually became their leader.
• Max's narration explicitly mentions that he was a cop. There's no way the Feral Kid could have known that considering by the time The Road Warrior, society has collapsed and he's unlikely to be old enough to remember the Main Force Patrol.

Fury Road is an Alternate Continuity where Max managed to outrun Wez after he left the refinery in The Road Warrior.

In Fury Road, Max is haunted by memories of people who claim that he left them to die. Perhaps he got away after delivering the rig and that Papagallo wasn't able to get it through the blockade setup by the Lord Humungus, thus dooming the villagers. Meanwhile, Max gets away, but sees the results from afar and is riddled with guilt for what he failed to do.

• In that case, where's his dog?
  • It is some kind of Alternate Continuity. Max has his Pursuit Special which was destroyed in the second film. It also a recurring element that War Boys have tumors due to radiation which wasnt in any other films as there was no nuclear war.
    • Beyond Thunderdome did mention a nuclear war and radiation.

Max's ghosts in Fury Road

In the original Mad Max, Max loses his wife and toddler son. Yet, in Fury Road, he's haunted by hallucinations of a girl who looks to be about 10, and who calls him "pa" when beckoning him to rejoin Furiosa. Continuity error? Retcon? Nope. Max has been haunted for so long that, in his mind, the ghosts of his wife and son have blurred together, and the girl we see is the average.

• He's also haunted by what looks to be an older man as well. My reckoning is that he abandoned a community at some point in the past.
• There is a two prequel comic that fills in the events between Beyond Thunderdome and Fury Road. It explains how Max got the Interceptor seen in the fourth film (it being cobbled together by Max with him winning the engine in another Thunderdome battle held at another location and, after having it been stolen, an enemy group assembled the car, to which Max stole the car back). The girl is named Glory, whom Max saved after the girl's mother saved him from bleeding to death. The mother asked Max to join them, but Max refused and drove off. As he looks in the rear view, the gang that had kidnapped the girl and stole his Interceptor, ran over the mother and child in pursuit of him. As for the other people that Max hallucinates, it could very well be other people he tried to help and failed to save, much like Glory and her mother.
• The game also uses the basic plot points of the deaths of Hope and Glory, Max's subsequent mental breakdown, and the recovery of the Interceptor, but played out differently.

Nux actually ends up in Valhalla

After searching for a glorious death and failing repeatedly, he finally succeeds through his acts of bravery and is rewarded at last. Nux now battles in the day and feasts in the night, riding a shiny chrome battlecar.

• Or he drives the War Rig, as they died together.
• Alternatively, he went to the Fields of Freja, a shining green place where half of the gloriously slain go and there he waits for Capable. He considered Valhalla briefly, before he caught a glimpse of Freja's Field and decided that Capable would like it better there. He currently braids the Splendid Angharad's hair as they wait together in the Green Place for their friends.
  • Thereby turning two of this film's Tear Jerker moments into a Heartwarming Moment!
  • Agreed, that's wonderful. Freya's fields are much more appropriate for everyone given the desolation.
  • Plus Nux reunited with those gals is just too sweet.
• Related: the bastardization of Norse Paganism by Immortan Joe offended the Gods. Nux, unknowingly, was doing the work of Loki (as shown by his scared lips) in casting down the false version that Immortan Joe had created.
• Considering the way things are on Earth in these films and the constant death and hardship, the existence of the spiritual and the hereafter would make things a lot more bearable.

There is no continuity; this is mythology

The Mad Max films aren't meant to be a precise and factual history of exactly what happened in post-apocalyptic Australia; they're legends told of a mythical folk-hero. The when and where of each film is irrelevant, as is Max's backstory before the start of the film. All that matters is that these things once happened, and Max was there. It's like all the contradictory tales of Heracles in Greek mythology, his loves and wives and wars. And just because these stories seem to contradict each other, it doesn't mean they're not all true.

• This would probably explain a lot of continuity issues and the fact that Max seems to be immortal. There was likely a Max, a goofy guy in a flying machine, a feral kid, feral kids who founded a new society in the ruins of Sydney, etc. and a mythic version of Max is tied to them all.

In other words, Max Rockatansky now operates on the same level as James Bond.

• In this vein, Fury Road is the result of Canon Welding by future generations of story tellers. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is the original account of how Max saved an oppressed group from an evil warlord with an epic tanker chase, but it merged with the similar legend of Furiosa's fight against Immortan Joe. Thus we see repeated story elements in both myths and now have Max, a Canon Foreigner, awkwardly fitting into someone else's story.
• The end of Fury Road even arms this with a bit of canon: the quote at the end is sourced to "The First History Man", who isn't a real person and seems to exist in the universe of the films. The implication is that society did manage to recover after a while, and reborn society tried to make sense of the scattered legends of the wasteland.
• Not James Bond. Arturius Rex.

Max is Madder than you think

... and that's why the details of his past are so hard to reconcile. So many stories range across the wasteland about who he is and what he's done, and his mind is so fractured, that he himself can't make out who he is or what he's done.

Fury Road is one of the only events in Max's life that happened as we saw it.

A number of observers have noted that this is the only film in the series to have narration (however small and quick it may be) delivered by Max personally. As such, it makes sense that Furiosa gets the lion's share of attention, since it's him remembering her. Since Max doesn't seem like the kind of person to bullshit a story, it makes sense with how brutal the film plays out; which also applies to how he's naturally not averse to telling it with all the crap he had to personally go through - instead of having all that stuff swept under the rug by someone else making a legend out of it. This was Max remembering a really rough week where he got his car wrecked twice, was used as a blood-bag and a hood ornament, had to endure a sandstorm while outside of a vehicle, met a woman as dangerous as he was, got pulled into another issue he wanted no part of, and then helped said woman take back one of the few safe havens left in the wasteland.

The Clan of Many Mothers are cannibals.

How else could they survive in a wasteland?

• Two-headed lizards, trading, stealing. Like everybody else. Cannibalism isn't exactly sustainable.
  • There's also the fact that, before they were driven to the wasteland, they had one of the few patches of arable land left in world. And the Keeper of Seeds has... well, a bunch of seeds. Farming is a thing.
  • The Keeper of the Seeds had seeds that wouldn't grow anywhere she tried to plant them, so one thing we know is that they are not surviving on agriculture alone. The fact that they use the Valkyrie as bait implies that they often ambush travelers. And their pride in their skill with guns means they are not afraid to kill for their ends.
    • It is indicated the Green Place turning into a toxic swamp was a relatively recent event. until it died, the Green Place would have been able to sustain a population through agriculture, as well as probable a degree of hunter-gathering. The Keeper of the Seeds says she saved her stock, but they wouldn't take. meaning that she was trying to find a place where the crops they relied on in the Green Place would grow, to create a new home, but hadn't found anywhere clean enough to support farms. odds are that after the Green Place died, they turned to raiding to survive, killing travelers and convoys, and taking their food and water.

The Pursuit Special will drive again.

Since they managed to salvage it the first time it gets hit with a grenade-spear, it's possible that they can do it again from what's left of it. Furiosa has it built as a thank you gift for Max's help in overthrowing Immortan Joe.

• It was blown the hell up in Mad Max 2. Clearly the car, like Max himself, is not bound by basic rules of continuity. It's part of Max's legend, so of course when Max turns up, so too does the Pursuit Special.

Max projects his continued trauma over The Toecutter onto Immortan Joe

It's only really justified by Actor Allusion, but the fact that Max narrates Fury Road and both Immortan Joe and The Toecutter are played by the same actor, but there may be a deeper meaning to this concept. Though little about them is similar, Max unconsciously associates his newest enemy with the one who took his wife and child. Small details about Toecutter find their way into Joe, justifying their sharing an actor and the most superfluous of similarities they have.

That thing Rictus is wearing on his face?

It's to keep his mouth from flapping open. From what we see of him, he's not exactly an intellectual powerhouse— he's wearing a chinstrap because otherwise he would be a (literally) slack-jawed moron.

• It's actually part of a respirator. The big thing on his back is an oxygen rig, as evidenced by the jets of cold, pressurized air streaming out of it when it's damaged.

In this setting, the Pacific Ocean dried up.

Hence, the existence of a salt flat that would take over 160 days to cross, even on a motor vehicle. And hence, how Max knew that said salt flat was that large: notice that he was working on making a map in that scene. At some point, he must have remembered the Pacific Ocean from before the Apocalypse, and realized that where he was sitting was precisely where the coast of the Pacific Ocean used to be.

• The 160 days most likely refers to walking most of the way; there's no way to carry so much gasoline on a few motorbikes. Also, if the Pacific Ocean dried up the atmosphere would quickly become unbreathable; most of the oxygen on our planet is produced by sea algae. It's more likely that the oceans are still there, but are full of poisonous and irradiated algae.
• According to the game, the water level has significantly decreased. Part of the action takes place on a dried-out seabed
• Given Australia once had an Inland sea, and that the Video Game States that before the drought there were massive floods, perhaps in Eastern Australia the Sea reformed and then dried up.

Mad Max takes place during an Ice Age

This may seem counterintuitive given what we've seen of Australia is a hot desert hell scape but actually makes more sense the more you think of it. Following a Nuclear War fire storms kick up massive amounts of soot in the Northern Hemisphere causing a Nucelar Winter. Which triggers another Ice Age. Which in turn causes glaciers to form which causes the oceans to recede and expose the Australian Oceanic Plateau. Furthermore during the last Glacial Period it is believed that while Australia became cooler it also became windier and drier. Which would be devastating for a country all ready dealing with a massive drought. Assuming the Water Wars occurred before the Oil Wars. Then an already dry and dusty Australia would get even worse if it became even drier and windier. The winds would kick up massive dust storms.

The film takes place on the planet Angelis in an even further future

• In Gorka Morka, Angelis is a world of barren desert populated by orks and gretchins (trying to avenge a spaceship to get off-world), intelligent but hideously mutated humans, and cave-dwelling humans who want to be orks (with shamans that have an affinity for mechanics). While they're currently involved in a Forever War, it's possible that in the future the orks leave the planet (taking most of the fuel and water with them), leaving the mutants to rule over the orklike humans. Any memories about the world before the catastrophe can be attributed to Lost Knowledge, which the mutants are very parcimonious with.

Max is the Emperor during the Age of Strife

Being the Immortal God-Emperor explains why Max seems to have lived an improbably long time without getting older, and how he takes all the abuse he does while hardly slowing down. When we see Max in the first film, Terra is already well into the Age of Strife, to the point that it's degenerated to late 20th-century technology. All the hallucinations are actually the result of psychic interference from the massive warp storms that are still raging. Empy still isn't quite ready to start empire building yet, but his emotional arc in Fury Road (and hand in helping re-organize that pocket of civilization) show he's working up to it. When he does, he'll use some of the tricks he picked up in this one:

• He rips off a lot of Immortan Joe's style and iconography.
• He organizes warrior castes dedicated to self-sacrifice.
• He gets a steel dart in his forehead, ultimately breaking it off to leave the head stuck to his skull. He would later repurpose this for the Spehss Marine's Long Service Studs, which are bolted into the exact same part of the skull.
• He organizes an all-female fighting force to escort the Black Ships. Later, one of his supposed incarnations/avatars would organize the Sisters of Battle.
• He likes big shoulder pads.
• The Oceans have changed significantly by the Age of Strife:
  • The Marianas Trench is an exposed canyon
  • Lindisfarne/Holy Island is a mountaintop outcropping

Fury Road shares a universe with 2000 AD (Judge Dredd)

Judge Rockatansky is on his Long Walk in the Cursed Earth, bringing law to the lawless. This is how he knows Furiosa's trek across the salt flat is futile, the only thing on the other side of that salt is the Megacity Sydney-Melbourne Conurb, and they'd never let a group of irradiated wastelanders in.

• I'm thinking it makes more sense to be set in the Alternate Continuity of Dredd.
• When Max says there's nothing in the 160 day drive, he's referring to the fact that the Big Meg won't take them in, as they might be considered mutants.

Tom Hardy's Max isn't actually Max Rockatansky

He's the feral kid from The Road Warrior, who took his hero's name and grew up to be just like him. Think about it; they look different (What's a "recast"? Let's keep the Fourth Wall firmly in place for now.), Hardy!Max is way too young to be Gibson!Max assuming Fury Road is set after Beyond Thunderdome, and Hardy!Max is far less talkative than even Gibson!Max, mostly communicating in grunts. His memories are also inconsistent with Max's past, as he never had a daughter and he was born long before the world became "fire and blood".

• Then where did he get the Pursuit Special? He also specifically states that he was a cop, something he never talked about in The Road Warrior.
  • In the prequel comic, Max is shown rebuilding it and going to Gastown to win a V-8 engine. Notably, in the flashbacks to the first three films, he resembles Mel Gibson, but in the present day, he looks like Tom Hardy.
• Also, it would be too much of a coincidence for Feral Kid to have the same busted knee
• According to Word of God, Fury Road takes place approx 45 years After The End per an interview with Fandango: http://www.fandango.com/movie-news/interview-director-george-miller-answers-all-your-big-mad-max-fury-road-questions-749278 "Fandango: When looking at the four films as a whole, where does Fury Road take place in the timeline? Miller: If you put a gun to my head, I’d say after Thunderdome, but it’s very loose. I can’t even work out the chronology of the first, second and third, let alone the fourth thirty years later. Fandango: The Mad Max series is set after society crumbles, but what exactly happened to the world? Miller: For me it all starts next Wednesday – when all the bad things we read in the news come to pass; stuff we never saw coming. The apocalypse of some form happens, and you wind up 45-50 years in the future. That's where we pick up." Therefore, Hardy's Max is actually Max Rockatansky II, the original Max's son. He idolized his Dad, and when the pressure of living in the Wasteland (and probably Dad's death) finally pushed him into Sanity Slippage, he adopted most of Dad's history (I used to be a cop, and maybe Dad's habit of wearing the leg brace) as his own as a way of keeping Dad alive somehow. He probably managed to build his own copy of the Pursuit Special as well (note the significant differences: different rear rims, only one large fuel tank in the back).
  • Link or it didn't happen.
• Even without Word of God, we know Joe's citadel has existed as such for one whole generation of War Boys Nux's age to be raised, and for 7000 days (20 years) to pass since a young Furiosa's kidnapping. Gibson's Max was in his prime during the Apocalypse, which is when Immortan Joe rose to power. Now, Hardy's Max refers to himself as a road warrior, like the Feral Kid did to Gibson's Max; it is possible that the kid accompanied the original Max and then took to wearing his uniform, his name and even the leg brace. There's also a hallucination of a child calling to him ("Come on, Pa! Let's go!") when he abandons the Vuvalini. It could be Sprog, but it could be a memory of Max II calling to Max I.

Tom Hardy's Max is Max Rockatansky reincarnated

He lived. He died. He lives again.

Tom Hardy's Max is Max Rockatansky... Junior

Max Senior eventually found a new wife, retired from wasteland scavenging, and sired a son. As they say, like father like son.

In Mad Max: The Wasteland, it will be revealed that Max Took a Level in Kindness

We already kinda see this in Fury Road: At first, he is completely apathetic to the plight of Furiosa and the wives, and doesn't seem to give a damn about The Citadel. However, by the end, he puts his life on the line for them, expecting nothing in return. He easily could've stayed and ruled The Citadel with Furiosa, but didn't. This is because he realized that he could still do good in the world and help people, just like in his days as a police officer. The whole situation pretty much resulted in a reverse Sanity Slippage. He'll travel from town to town, village to village, punishing the guilty and protecting the innocent. His heroic deeds will give birth to the legend of The Road Warrior.

This isn't a post-apocalyptic movie

This is just what happens when people get lost in the Outback. When Max says "I used to be a cop" he means he was giving out speeding tickets in Adelaide last week.

• What makes you think that they're lost in the Outback? Isn't this just a slice-of-life movie about contemporary Australian society?

Only Australia is a wasteland; the rest of the world is kind of messed up but doing better

The Hope Spot where the Wives and Vuvalini see a satellite and wonder if there are still people out there could be a hint towards this. Australia was the only place that got hit with nuclear weapons, and while the rest of the planet is still recovering from the oil and water wars they are on the bounce back into functioning civilization. Australia however, because of the nuclear fallout and the way society there collapsed into what we see in the films, was quarantined — nobody goes in, nobody goes out. It's cruel but the other continents are fearful of the radioactivity and total anarchy that fills Australia now.

Fury Road takes place in the same universe as the Hunger Games series

Both series take place after an unspecified apocalyptic scenario has destroyed civilization and significantly altered the landscape. Australia was quarantined and descended into an anarchist wasteland, whereas North America was ecologically better off but was overtaken by a fascist dictatorship.

• Makes a lot of sense, except that the Capital had hugely advanced biotech. So if this is the same universe, and why the heck not, it's a distant prequel during the first decades after the war.

The Green place was also where Max found the children in Thunderdome

The kids who stayed behind turned into the Vuvalini.

Furiosa becomes ruler of Bartertown

She has no real place among the Vuvalini anymore, and Joe's tribe isn't an option either. But if she ends up in Bartertown, she's likely to attract the attention of Auntie, who's getting on in years and could use an enforcer/heir who is smart enough to rule and tough enough to keep order.

Nux is this universe's version of Wade Wilson.

Crazy Is Cool Fountain of Memes with cancer who is a sociopath killer but ends up a good guy that protects people? Yep.

Nux will live again

On account of his valorous acts in battle, Nux actually ends up in Valhalla and will one day return to fight in Ragnarök.

• Or, going by the above, he'll wind up in Freya's Fields instead. Still a warrior, still going to kick the ass of the undead monstrosities, but he gets someplace green in the meantime.

Immortan Joe is really The Toecutter

I know, it's not the official mythos, but this is WMG, so what the hell. Going beyond just an Actor Allusion, Joe really IS The Toecutter, having survived Max running him down in the original movie, but the injuries he sustained caused both an aged, crippled appearance, and gave him partial amnesia, which is why he doesn't remember Max. However, he retained his sadistic, cruel personality and charisma, which allowed him to build a much bigger powerbase than he ever had as leader of the biker gang. However, his injuries are catching up to him, and he's desperate to breed a son to take over from him.

• Jossed. According to promotional materials, Joe is a former army colonel named Joe Moore.
  • Maybe it's a case of Unreliable Narrator, in that Toecutter survived the wreck, pieced his broken body back together, but his mind was irreversibly shattered. He suffered from total amnesia, became Joe Moore, foregoing his former biker hooligan ways in a half-recalled shadow of a memory of the consequences of his actions, and the rest played out as in the comics & Fury Road.

Max knew there was no green place to the east

When he asks Furiosa where it is and she tells him it's to the east, he clicks his tongue and looks away, dropping the subject. Let's consider that Max has been traveling the Wasteland for a long time, and it's implied that he might have even tried crossing the Plains of Silence before. Max might have known that there was nothing green between Citadel and the salt, but didn't say anything because he figured Furiosa wouldn't have believed him.

Furiosa helped kidnap the wives FOR Immortan Joe.

We know Furiosa was taken from the Green Place 20 years ago. Now, she's risen as one of the highest ranking commanders of Immortan Joe's army to the point where the war boys don't even question her when she deviates from the plan. She's also looking for redemption, specifically - not just escape from Immortan Joe. But one tidbit of information about Furiosa stands out: She knows exactly where to drive. And when Max asks, she tells him she's been that way "many times." She would never have become an Imperator if she had been that way many times trying to escape, or free the wives. She's been back to the Green Place, under Immortan Joe's orders, to help **kidnap** more. It was through these actions she rose through the ranks as Imperator, and also why freeing the wives (instead of killing Immortan Joe or freeing the people of the Citadel) was what she needed for redemption.

• Also to note: They may have stopped the raids on the Green Place a while ago; this batch of wives may have been raised since they were children. Angharad was the oldest and the only one (besides Furiosa) who insisted that the Green Place even exists, the younger ones probably don't even remember it at all.

Despite the time that has passed between the movies in-universe, Max is still the same guy.

The desolation inflicted upon the planet is far beyond anything we could do with the nuclear weapons we have. So that means that technology must have been more developed when things went awry and the Water Wars started. Who is to say that Max wasn't exposed to some nanomachine-thingies that stop him from aging, or something similar? Unlike the James Bond case, there is an actual possibility than Max is immortal (or at least ageless, since he certainly doesn't seem to have a Healing Factor). It could also explain his madness: he has seen far more than anyone else alive, and he wants to forget it so hard that he, himself, actually doesn't know he is ageless, having long buried any recollection that may help him make that realization.

Imperator Furiosa has been to the Green Place "many times" but only in her mind.

That Furiosa has been to the Green Place "many times" yet still doesn't seem to realize that it's gone is bothering. Maybe she meant that the thought of escaping to the sanctuary was the only thing keeping her going, and when she had moments of weakness, she would "go to the Green Place" to center herself and remind herself of her ultimate goal. The Vuvulani have to tell her that it's gone, so how did she not know this already, if she had physically gone there?

Furiosa is Immortan Joe's daughter.

It would explain a few things. Such as how she rose to such a high position in such a patriarchal society, especially when she seems to be the only woman near the top. Also, while Immortan Joe is all about getting his wives back, he doesn't really seem to terribly concerned with punishing Furiosa, comparatively. As for fitting continuity, Furiosa's mother was one of the Vuvulvani who was forced to be one of Joe's wives after they lost a battle. Later, she (and possibly other wives) successfully escaped, which is why Joe automatically runs to check his wives when something goes wrong.

• According to Charlize Theron, Furiosa was supposed to become a wife herself but was discovered to be sterile. Women who fail to reproduce are cast out and she hid among the War Pups instead, who treat her as a man.

Furiosa is Immortan Joe's son.

Chromosomally, that is. Same theory as above about how Joe fathered a child with one of the Vuvulvani, but the resulting baby wasn't any less genetically-atypical than his known surviving sons: it had Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Externally Furiosa appeared completely female, and was brought up to self-identify as such, but she has no uterus or ovaries and never menstruated. This is why she was designated as sterile at such a young age, and why she was shunted over to the War Pups once the Organic Mechanic determined why she'd never had a period.

• Aside from the infertility, she's perfectly healthy, and could have easily been the very heir Joe'd been seeking all along ... except he'd already built a society so sexist that merely looking like a female was enough to bar any girl, intersex or otherwise, from being respected by his misogynistic personality-cult. As fate would have it, Furiosa claimed her rightful place as Joe's successor by force instead.

Toecutter and Immortan Joe are Brothers.

Going beyond the Actor Allusion, It would explain why they look similar. They could be Twin brothers who started off on the opposite sides of the Law. Given the Time between the events of Mad Max and Fury Road, it's possible that while Toecutter was going around terrorizing people while Joe built his army and took over the citadel.

The War Rig is the body of Megatron.

In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Megs transformed into a spiked rusty rig. Optimus beheaded him, but there's no telling what happened to the body.

• Alternately, the War Rig is Optimus in stasis lock. It resembles his vehicle mode much more than it does Megatron's.
• On another note, with the whole Machine Worship going on and the War Boys being promised an afterlife of being "shiny and chrome" themselves, it's possible that the cult worships a Decepticon, possibly a stasis-locked Megatron they are trying to repair and awaken.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are really...

Well, you know that Horsemen of the Apocalypse fan theory about Mad Max? I was thinking about, and noticed somethings in Fury Road which got me thinking. I heard about how the warlords symbolise the Horsemen, but I disagree about War being the Bullet Farmer. I go by color schemes, and if we do that, then what do we get? Which member of the War Boys wears red and has a large black sword?

Yeah, Doof Guy is War. He is also blind, like the Bullet Farmer, but he is more like War than the Bullet Farmer. Doof Guy will never stop playing his flaming guitar, no matter what. He never actually fights, but yeah, he is clearly aggressive beyond all reason. So, by this logic, we get the four horsemen:

Conquest: Immortan Joe (white)War: Doof Guy (red)Famine: People Eater (black)Death: Mad Max (pale, ashen)

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Fury Road takes place between Mad Max and The Road Warrior

Toecutter survived his encounter with Max and invented Immortan Joe's persona to rule the Wasteland. After Joe's death, Rictus survives the War Rig crash. His face is damaged beyond recognition so he fashions an iron mask from the War Rig's scrap... and christens himself the Lord Hummungus.

The Rock Riders were the ones who kidnapped Furiosa from The Cult of Many Mothers

Joe's territory seems pretty far away from The Green Place for him to have been raiding it himself. The Rock Riders are much closer, are apparently on trading terms with members of The Citadel, and Furiosa seemed willing to cheat them in a deal given the implication that there wasn't any gas in the pod (as she was heading to Gas Town to pick up more gas when she took off in the first place).

The Buzzards, Rock Riders, and Polecats are suffering from deformities similar to the War Boys, and the later two groups may have once been War Boys

It's notable that all three groups wear masks which cover their faces, and the rock riders and buzzards wear clothing that hides the rest of their bodies. Of course, given how they live in a desert this would be a sensible form of protection anyway, but it's easy to believe the War Boys aren't the only faction showing signs of irradiation. Given their ties with the Citadel, it's possible that the Polecats ware a type of elite War Boys, and that that the Rock Riders might be a breakaway group.

Max Rockatansky has become a legacy character by the time Fury Road takes place

During the events of the original Mad Max, Max was in his early 20s. According to Word of God, Fury Road takes place about 45 years after the collapse of civilization, which would mean Max Rockatansky would be roughly the same age as Immortan Joe. Yet, the Max we see in the film is more or less the same age as Max during the events of Beyond Thunderdome, set 20 years after the original film. If magic and the like is discounted, this should clearly be impossible. Yet it's not so impossible if one considers the possibility that the Max seen in Fury Road is not the same individual who destroyed Toecutter and his gang before the apocalypse.

• Because of Max's deeds in The Road Warrior, Beyond Thunderdome and other events occurring off-screen, Max's legend spread throughout post-apocalyptic Australia over the years and decades. As a result, regardless whether the original Max is even still alive, there is at least one man Walking the Earth under the name of Max, thereby ensuring that Max's legend endures.