Everything Mike Ryan and Vince Mancini said in their reviews of Mad Max: Fury Road is 100 percent accurate. It’s great and ridiculous and endlessly entertaining and completely commits to its insanity; there’s no break in the action, so you never get a chance to catch your breath and think about the logic of, for instance, carrying a flamethrower guitarist in your brigade.
It’s the ultimate power move: King Immortan Joe is so sure that he’s going to catch his prey that he dedicates an entire vehicle to one musician, complete with dozens of speakers and straps to keep his guitar player snug and sound. Intimidation is the intended effect, but the King is also just looking out for his guys. The entire world is one big sponge that hasn’t tasted water in weeks. It gets boring riding your death-cycles out there. His men need music to keep them awake, and it’s not like they can turn on the radio and listen to the latest hit by Spin Doctors (I assume the world went to hell after Pocket Full of Kryptonite hit No. 3 on the Billboard 200).
It’s up to one man in a red onesie to entertain the troops. He’s their Bob Hope.
But things weren’t always so rosy for the Doof Warrior (as played by iOTA). Director George Miller explained his origin story in an interview with Fandango.
“One character who didn’t get his own comic was the Doof Warrior,” [Miller] revealed. “I want to tell a story about him in a comic if there’s an opportunity. For me, it was all about how someone who is blind survives in this place. How does someone weak survive the apocalypse? He survived because he was blind – because he lived deep in an unlit mine, where it was an advantage to be blind.”
So how did he wind up playing the electric guitar during battle?
Miller explained: “So, deep in the mine, he would sit there and eat rodents and get the water from the sea bed — and he would also play his guitar where no one could hear it. One day Immortan Joe came past, and someone heard the music. Then he was called upon when [Joe] needed a bugler or the bagpipe — someone who helps call everyone to war.” (Via)
So, there you go, the Doof Warrior is basically Theon/Reek, but blind, and he owns a guitar. What’s left unsaid by Miller, though, is whether he’s available for weddings, graduations, and bar/bat mitzvahs because I would like to go back in time and hire him for all of those.
Via: Fandango
For more of today’s top stories, let’s throw it to theDESK:
