28 Years Later basically did this.
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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I've literally had this thought the last time I watched Idiocracy.
The first Mad Max movie is literally just a cop (Max) fighting against a deadly biker gang in a small town. The second movie didn't say anything about an apocalypse, it was just set in a desert wasteland.
It was the American (maybe international?) version of Mad Max 2 that added a prologue about an apocalyptic world event.
So yeah, in the original Australian version, this may just be some lawless hicks surviving in the Australian desert, while the rest of the world continues on like normal.
You can see the original script here: https://www.scribd.com/document/253321759/Mad-Max-2-Script
To understand who he was you must go back to the last days of the old world...
when, for reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior nations went to war...
and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all.
for without fuel they were nothing. They had built a house of straw...
People stopped in the streets and listened: for the first time they heard the sound of silence.
Their world crumbled...
That script matches the production script you can see here: https://propstore.com/product/mad-max-2-the-road-warrior/262-hand-annotated-production-script/
So, it seems like there was no more oil (the imagery in the script seems to suggest the oil fields being burnt). It is a world-wide apocalypse, although not necessarily of the nuclear kind - it depends how literal you think "touched off a blaze which engulfed them all" is.
I haven't watched Mad Max one in twenty years, but I'm pretty sure the backdrop is rising international political tensions and the ending suggests a global nuclear war.
Opening monologue to The Road Warrior:
My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos, ruined dreams, this wasted land. But most of all, I remember the road warrior, the man we called Max. To understand who he was we have to go back to the other time, when the world was powered by the black fuel and the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel — gone now, swept away. For reasons long forgotten two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel they were nothing. They'd built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked, but nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. Cities exploded — a whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. On the roads it was a white-line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice, and in this maelstrom of decay ordinary men were battered and smashed — men like Max, the warrior Max. In the roar of an engine, he lost everything and became a shell of a man, a burnt-out desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past, a man who wandered out into the wasteland. And it was here, in this blighted place, that he learned to live again.
So, if I'm understanding this correctly, the Road Warrior took place in a past that was "powered by black fuel." Which suggests that in the future we are actually NOT dependent on oil.
They don't mention anything replacing the black fuel. Could just be (likely) the future is unpowered altogether.
I’ve not seen mad max in a very long time but it’s definitely post apocalyptic
Thunderdome is a prime example how Americans ruin everything
Oh come on, can't we just get beyond Thunderdome?
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So, “The Village” except Mad Max?
Isn’t Mad Max a documentary?
and it turns out it was a just a large trailer park community in the Australian desert that had all gone through the deepest hallucinogenic drug effects from Meth and Opioids and somehow survived undetected for 20 years on their own in the wilderness.
I've camped at Silverton before—where most Mad Max were shot. There's a campground a few kilometres out.
It was 53C (127F). Didn't drop below 40 until 1am. No drugs needed; just go loony in the heat.
just go loony in the heat.
You won't just go loony. I'm pretty sure those conditions are ripe for permanent brain damage. Stay safe out there.
The american numbers should always be bigger than those hippy numbers.
The pub out there can get pretty fucking loose also, ahahahha
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They get to New Zealand, and it's a complete utopia. When they try to ask if their oil didn't run out, they just answer that they stopped using that stuff decades ago.
NZ?
And as the flutes play, we pan across the hills rolling in the distance, the rich green contrasting against the vivid azure blue sky with brilliantly white clouds puffy as cotton balls. And we know and feel that all is at peace in this world.
Fade to black. End scene.
Roll the credits
It's a short film, but a good one.
Like the episode of Stargate where Carter and O’Neill gate into an ice world and can’t get back so they think they’re going to die, except they got the signals crossed with a second gate buried in Antarctica and Hammond just sends helicopters to rescue them.
Best blooper reel ever.
"Oh god! I'm stuck on a glacier with McGuyver!"
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That would be the very first one. It wasnt post apocalypse at all. It was just "Australia has a gang problem."
There's some elements of things not being quite right beyond the gang but yeah. Either that's a very subtle long game or just weird film making... (It was weird film making)
This is my working assumption for all those teenage dystopias.
Hunger Games? World outside the US is fine. Better, now that the hegemon is more interested in watching it's own population murder each other for television ratings.
Don't want me making that assumption about your story? Maybe mention anywhere outside the continental US at least one [1] time. At least Handmaid's Tale acknowledges Canada. And I guess heaven forbid Mexico ever get a mention.
Wasn't the epilogue of A Handmaid's Tale basically the rest of the world saying "wow, what happened in America was super fucked"
They run out of sepia filter, so mexico cannot be mentioned.
To be fair, this is a common twist in those sort of stories.
The world outside was watching in out of amusement.
The world the main character had always known turns out to be a penal colony populated by criminals and their descendents.
The rest of the world was performing an "experiment" on the population here the main character originated.
The Hunger Games owes everything to Stephen King. They basically just took The Long Walk novel and glittered/mashed it up with The Running Man movie. Neither of those took place during or after any apocalypse. They were each just set in either the now, or the very near future, in an America that has gone fully corrupt as a result of being morally, politically, and economically bankrupt. King was (and always has) written very local and topical stories set in what is literally his here and now. When he lived in Maine, he wrote Maine stories. When he moved to Florida, he wrote Duma Key. So, it's no surprise that a YA story as derivative as The Hunger Games would have the same blind spot for Global events as the inspirational works.
But, also if we were really going to descend into an apocalypse (or a dictatorship), news of the broader globe would be one of the first casualties. People inside most apocalypse (and fascist dystopian) stories don't usually have a lot of knowledge about the "outside" world. If they do, it's usually an unreliable narrative.
‘Rollerball’ and ‘Death Race 2000’, both from 1975, are the progenitors of the genre. The first one is based on the screenwriter William Harrison's short story ‘Roller Ball Murder’ from 1973, the second one on Ib Melchior's 1956 short story ‘The Racer’, but the stories are pretty much unknown compared to the films.
Both of these set the totalitarian and corrupt backdrop. ‘The Running Man’ particularly feels like a rehashing of ‘Death Race 2000’ — at least the film does, idk about the novel since they're supposedly not 1:1.
‘The Hunger Games’ also uses the premise of ‘Battle Royale’, afaik.
They basically just took The Long Walk novel and glittered/mashed it up with The Running Man movie.
Whenever I play either fallout or the mad max game I like imagining the world outside the country the game focuses on to be going on business as usual, ignoring the anarchist apocalypse across the pond, which for some reason brings me great joy :3
Unfortunately, we kind of know what happened to some of the other countries in Fallout. Kind of.
Think of it like pay per view tv. We subscribe to the MadMax channel and watch as they tear themselves apart. Are You NOT ENTERTAINED!?!?
Sounds more like the US at this point
Kind of like Russia compared to Europe. Like just nonsensically kicking themselves in the nuts over there for no reason and being belligerent for no upside.
Everyone else just goes "yeah, we were wondering wtf you were doing all this time."
In my head, most of the world in the Fallout universe is also mostly just normal
Fallout does talk about other parts of the world though, like how the US went to war with China in Alaska (if I'm recalling correctly)
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