YMMV / Mad Max

• Mad Max
• Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
• Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome
• Mad Max: Fury Road
• Mad Max (2015) (videogame)

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The entire series:

• Awesome Music: This fan video of "One Of the Living" ties all four films together.
• Critical Dissonance: While many fans like the third film the least, critics like Roger Ebert have declared it the best of the original trilogy.
• Epileptic Trees: The series' unusually elastic continuity, complete with Word of God from George Miller that it doesn't really matter whether the films are all about the same guy, has spawned plenty of theories about how they tie together, with two especially popular ones:
  • The original film is what really happened to Max, with the sequels showing the increasingly grandiose legends about him that evolved in future generations.
  • Max had a complete psychotic break after his family's murder, and from then on is just comatose in a psych ward imagining getting revenge for it and then more increasingly ludicrous adventures. One bit of support for this is that by the time of Fury Road, his new antagonist looks just like the Toecutter.
• Fanon Discontinuity: While the sequels are much better known outside of Australia than the original, most fans consider the third film the weakest of the original trilogy. Beyond Thunderdome does, on the other hand, skew toward being a Guilty Pleasure emblematic of mid-1980s science fiction, and it's the one that's generated the most well-known pop-cultural phrases.
• Genre Turning Point: The first two films together rewrote the rulebook for post-apocalyptic fiction, especially with its aesthetic of desert wastelands, big V8 muscle cars, and biker gangs.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Mel Gibson playing a burnt out cop whose wife was murdered.
  • George Miller would go on to make an animated kids' movie about penguins. That would be hilarious in itself, but the title of the movie? Happy Feet.
• Memetic Mutation: Mad Max takes place in modern day, this is just what the Australian outback is like.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: While the 2015 video game adaptation goes on the other page, the same cannot be said about the 1990 Nintendo Entertainment System video game adaptation. Scavenger levels are hampered by low fuel, which serves as a time limit and the overworld is huge. Arena levels are rife with Artificial Stupidity, where enemies tend to drive into bottomless pits. Your reward for beating this game? You get A Winner Is You ending.
• Special Effect Failure: When Toecutter crashes into the truck you can clearly see that the front of the truck is just a painted sheet of metal. As the truck goes by you can clearly see it in front of the truck as well. Justified though given the shoestring budget as otherwise the truck would’ve received major damage.
• Spiritual Adaptation: The Mad Max franchise as a whole is arguably the closest we will ever get to a live action adaptation of Violence Jack.
  • Fun fact, Go Nagai, who created Violence Jack, actually drew a poster for the first Mad Max film◊.
• Star Trek Movie Curse: While the first and third films are popular in their own right, they're a bit more contested compared to Road Warrior and Fury Road, which are widely regarded as masterpieces and classics of the action genre. A joke among fans is "if the Pursuit Special appears, it's a good film. If it's destroyed, it's an awesome film."
• X Meets Y: Many would argue that Mad Max is pretty much The Punisher meets Violence Jack, but with more car racing.