The Mad Max Heroes And Villains We Need To See Again
Whether they’re hero or villains, many of the characters we’ve met in the Mad Max films have one thing in common–through brutality or more benevolent means, they’re trying to build and maintain something like the civilization they’ve lost. Max often leaves their stories behind before we can learn their fates, and here are some of those characters I’d like to see either return or at least get updates about.
Aunty Entity
When we last see the chief antagonist of 1985’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, she’s failed to retrieve The Master (Angelo Rossitto) whose expertise was integral in keeping things running in Bartertown. A good chunk of Bartertown is destroyed thanks to explosions set off during the heroes’ locomotive escape, and she’s lost quite a bit of muscle–including her chief bruiser, the nearly unkillable Ironbar (Angry Anderson).
Considering Tina Turner’s passing last year it seems unlikely we could ever get a reappearance of Aunty Entity without recasting, though in Aunty Entity’s case I’m not quite as interested as seeing her again as simply learning the fate of Bartertown.
Quite a few online fan theorists have been wondering if someone like Immortan Joe or Dementus killed Aunty Entity between the events of Beyond Thunderdome and Mad Max: Fury Road.
But even without the warlords’ potential influence, Bartertown seemed to be hanging by a thread.
Did Aunty Entity find a way to revive the town without The Master’s help? Was there even anyone left in the place when she returned from the chase for The Master? Did she have to start again from scratch?
The Planet Erf Tribals Who Left
Perhaps the strangest group of people we’ve met in the Mad Max franchise are the Planet Erf tribe–a large group of children in Beyond Thunderdome who are the only survivors of a doomed aircraft. When they find him near death in the desert, the children believe Max is their savior Captain Walker, the plane’s pilot who left the children in their oasis and promised to return one day.
It takes some doing, but Max eventually convinces the children that he is no savior. Ignoring Max’s grim warnings, a small group of the tribe led by Savannah Nix (Helen Buday) leaves the rest of Planet Erf in the middle of the night to find their promised paradise, Tomorrow-morrow Land.
Max catches up with Nix and her friends and by the end of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, he’s secured them safe passage to the ruined Sydney–the closest thing they will ever find to Tomorrow-morrow Land. The film ends some time in the future, with Nix gathered somewhere in Sydney with the Planet Erf survivors and others we haven’t met.
She says that they light up Sydney every night, in the hopes that more survivors will come and they can rebuild the world. We never learn what happened to them though, and considering the cruelty of Mad Max’s world, it seems not unlikely that the wrong people followed their lights.
The Planet Erf Tribe Who Stayed Behind
When Max finds Nix and her friends in the desert, rather than bring them back to Planet Erf, he takes them to the closer Bartertown. From there they hitch a ride on an old locomotive, fight off Aunty Entity’s forces, and eventually fly to Sydney (minus Mad Max).
That leaves a big question mark with the fate of Slake (Tom Jennings) and the rest of the Planet Erf tribe who stay behind.
Do they ever learn what happened to their friends? Did they join them in the ruins of Sydney? Or did someone like Mad Max: Fury Road‘s Immortan Joe find their oasis and wipe them out?
The Feral Kid
When it comes to characters we actually get to know a little, 1981’s Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior has a pretty high body count. One of the few good guys to make it through is the Feral Kid, played by Emil Minty. At the end of the film, we learn that a much older version of the Feral Kid is the film’s narrator, and that in the years since the events of The Road Warrior, he has become “the chief of the Great Northern Tribe.”
This is the last we hear of the Feral Kid or of this Great Northern Tribe. It would be a boon to Mad Max fans to find out exactly what this tribe is and to see whoever the grunting, boomerang-hurling brat from The Road Warrior grew to become.
Furiosa
In spite of the name of the film, Charlize Theron’s Furiosa is pretty much the chief protagonist of Mad Max: Fury Road. Between her appearance in that film and the more recent Furiosa, it’s a safe bet there is no character besides Max himself in whom we’ve become more invested.
When we leave her at the end of Mad Max: Fury Road, Immortan Joe and almost all off his lieutenants are dead, and Furiosa seems like the most likely candidate in taking over the vast resources of The Citadel.
It would be interesting to see exactly what happens to the people of The Citadel after Mad Max: Fury Road. Does Furiosa take over the governing of the Citadel, or does she take a page from Max’s book and head out to the Wasteland?
Regardless of whether or not Furiosa stays, do the people of the Citadel survive, in spite of the attractive target it makes? Do the remaining war boys rebel against those they potentially blame for Immortan Joe’s death? Do the Citadel’s new rulers find themselves over their heads?
