As the Trope Codifier for The Apunkalypse and a major influence in works set After the End, it's only natural for Mad Max to be referenced heavily.
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General
- The Thunderdome sequence is pretty much a Fountain of Memes and even has a trope named after it.
- Max's killing of Johnny the Boy at the end of the first film is the Trope Codifier for Life-or-Limb Decision, and many later examples explicitly refer to the Mad Max scene.
- It's very difficult to come across any work set After the End that doesn't reference Mad Max in some way, shape, or form. Particularly, the punk-style raiders will generally make an appearance.
Anime and Manga
- Fist of the North Star is heavily inspired by the Mad Max franchise. It features a post-apocalyptic world run by thugs and and mohawked ruffians, with a Bruce Lee Clone trying to save his fiancee and the world.
- Revue Starlight The Movie features a sequence where a semitrailer truck drives into a Deadly Dust Storm.
Comic Books
- Judge Dredd spinoff Orlok: Agent Of East Meg One featured an Expy of Max called Bad Max who even drove Max's signature Pursuit Special.
- Watchmen has Rorschach make use of Max's can't-cut-the-chain-in-time tactic on a child-murderer who'd fed his victim's corpse to his dogs.
Fan Works
- Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space. Buster refers to The Dark Times when "Gangs roamed the streets like characters in a Road Warrior rip-off, only to discover it was impossible to maintain their gas-guzzling vehicles without a massive support infrastructure."
Literature
- In A Boy Made of Blocks, Sam, Tabitha, and Archie create a bizarre interconnected settlement in Minecraft that looks like the set of a Mad Max movie.
- The gamebook, Freeway Fighter, is directly inspired by the Mad Max films, set in a Post-Apocalyptic world after a virus had wiped out most of mankind, with the player hero being a badass driver travelling through harsh deserts to deliver important blueprints while battling various Disaster Scavengers. The book also has a Climax Boss called "The Animal", a masked villain based on Lord Hummungus.
- The Discworld novel The Last Continent, which is basically a tour of Discworld's equivalent of Australia, has a section involving a Dwarf known only as "Mad", who lives in a battlewagon drawn by eight horses and is constantly attacked by raiders.
- The Dresden Files: In Ghost Story Harry quips "It's like Thunderdome" when the other ghosts gather around him in three dimensions. When they fetch Molly, he greets her with "Two ghosts enter, one ghost leaves."
- The Indestructible Man, a Past Doctor Adventures novel by Simon Messingham, is mainly a deconstruction of UFO (1970) and Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, but there's a Shout-Out to Mad Max when a character thinks of Australia where the Main Force Patrol struggle to control the lawless highways.
Live-Action Film
- In Liar Liar, Fletcher Reede references Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome with the line, "But she's beyond Thunderdome."
- The Saw films were basically inspired by the Life-or-Limb Decision Max forces Johnny the Boy into by cuffing his ankle to a crashed truck and blowing it up.
- Towards the final confrontation of Watchmen Ozymandias is looking at a wall of TV screens at his Antarctic base, one of which shows a channel playing The Road Warrior.
- Space Jam: A New Legacy: One of the planets in the Serververse is a Mad Max world, which is where LeBron James and Bugs Bunny go to find Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.
- Vengeance (2009 Heroic Bloodshed film): When Costello and his hitmen allies went through a cache of new guns, the lead hitman Kwai identifies a shotgun as "that Mad Max-style gun" (it is indeed the same model as Max's weapon from the second film).
Live-Action TV
- The American Gothic (1995) episode "The Strong Arm of the Law" is yet another work to use the "hand or explosion" thing, in this case dealt out by Lucas Buck to a criminal who really didn't notice who he was messing with.
- The Muppets Mayhem: In the season one finale, the band modifies the Electric Mayhem bus with exterior speakers similar to the Doof’s vehicle in Fury Road.
- Stranger Things: Max signs her arcade scores as "MADMAX." She's referred to as "Road Warrior" once.
Music
- Frankie Goes To Hollywood's "Two Tribes" is inspired by The Feral Kid's line "Two mighty warrior tribes went to war."
- Foster the People frontman Mark Foster is kidnapped by feral children in the music video of 'Helena Beat'.
- The Thunderdome lent its name to a long running Dutch Hardcore Techno festival and compilation album
series promoted by ID&T. - The climactic car chase was parodied in Phil Collins' video for "Don't Lose My Number".
Podcast
- The entire series was reviewed by the Now Playing Podcast in 2015 in anticipation of Fury Road.
Professional Wrestling
- The Road Warriors were heavily inspired by the raiders from the second film.
- Chris Jericho refers to himself as "The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla", which was one of the nicknames for the Lord Humungus.
Video Games
- Fallout features at least once per game Max's Iconic Outfit as an early game armour and expies of several characters appear in the games, including one character named Mel.
- The Grand Theft Auto Online update Arena War featured a handful of vehicles that resemble cars in the movies, most evidently Fury Road:
- The Vapid Imperator bears a striking resemblance to the Ford Falcon, and also has a number of different modifications that make it look similar to either the Interceptor/Pursuit Special, or a modified Magnum Opus fitted with the Wild Hunt body.
- The MTL Cerberus takes inspirations from the War Rig, evidently referenced in the cab design. However, the Cerberus is a 8-wheeler tanker while the War Rig is a semi truck.
- Arena War versions of the Issi Classic are based on a customized Mini Cooper S, dubbed "The Mini". The referenced car itself had a relatively minor role in Fury Road, which makes the reference unexpected.
- The Bravado Sasquatch is based on Rictus' "Bigfoot" Dodge Power Wagon monster truck.
- The Benefactor Bruiser is highly inspired by the People Eater's limousine, that being a Mercedez-Benz-based limousine body mounted on a semi truck chassis with multiple bumpers attached to the front..
- The Vapid Imperator
- Wasteland 2 features the Pursuit Special at the Rail Nomads' camp. Just like in Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, it's rigged with explosives.
- Road Blaster/Road Avenger features a red version of the Interceptor and an Expy of Max on his Roaring Rampage of Revenge to avenge his wife's death.
- Borderlands is heavily inspired by the Mad Max franchise. An Expy of the Lord Humungus named Mad Mel appears as a boss that the player must fight in an "Underdome."
- Mortal Kombat X has a pair of characters named Ferra/Torr who are Master Blaster in all but name: a small, intelligent child that controls a big, hulking homanoid with a bag covering his head.
- Piratez: The Masterblaster outfit, which is a unique combination of two units: an Ogre and a Gnome.
Western Animation
- Aqua Teen Hunger Force creators don't deny their love to the Mad Max at all:
- Meatwad, describing his digestive system, in "Unremarkable Voyage":
"My body consumes all waste material. It's like a thunderdome in here. Only two men enter, no men leaves. Rated R." - In Bob's Burgers episode "Friends With Burger-Fits" Linda and kids organised their own Freezerdome.
- South Park makes multiple references. Stan has a Street Warrior poster in his room. During the episode where Mel Gibson appears, he drives the Big Badass Rig from the second film. Cartman also refers to Gibson as "The Road Warrior".
- In The Boondocks episode "The Fried Chicken Flu", the Freeman family and their friends are attacked by Betty von Heusen and other neighbors, who have formed a "militia" (really a bandit gang) and attempt to rob them of their emergency supplies following a disaster. Betty's gang soon dress up in weird costumes reminiscent of Mad Max, and they engage in a car chase with the Freemans down a desert highway.
- The Simpsons:
- When they visit Australia, one of the Australians who chase the Simpsons back to the American embassy is a raider strongly resembling Wez.
- In "Beyond Blunderdome", Homer and Mel Gibson end up in a chase in one of the cars from Mad Max 2. Since it's Mel voicing himself, the episode is riddled in Actor Allusion.
- "Lemon Of Troy" has a homage to the sequence where Max and the Gyrocaptain are scouting the refinery from the hill overlooking it by having Bart scout the Shelbyville impound lot in the same manner filmed in the same style.
- In the ReBoot episode Bad Bob, the characters enter a game based on Mad Max. One of the binomes even resembles Humongous, who leads a biker gang.
- The French cartoon adaptation of Walter Melon has the episode Fat Max - The Roo's Revenge in which the titular hero stands in for a Mad Max parody. Motorless cars pulled by kangaroos abound.
- Phineas and Ferb: In "For Your Ice Only", the kids play Hockey Z-9, functionally the Thunderdome on ice.
- "Rickmancing the Stone", from Rick and Morty The protagonists go to a dimension that is a clear reference to Mad Max.
- The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) three-parter "Raphael: Mutant Apocalypse" is set in a Bad Future where the world has descended into a Mad Max-like wasteland, with Leo becoming a Lord Humungus-expy named "Maximus Kong" and Raph even (albeit wearily and sarcastically) once quotes the War Boys' cry of "What a day, what a lovely day."
