While 1979's original Mad Max was a massive hit worldwide, the iconic action movie was banned in New Zealand thanks to an alleged real-life crime.

1979’s original Mad Max was banned in New Zealand due to discomfiting similarities that one pivotal scene shared with an alleged real-life case. The Mad Max series is a franchise that has undergone some seismic tonal shifts across its four movies. While 1979’s dark original Mad Max is a brutal, sparse revenge thriller, its sequel The Road Warrior is a much less realistic, more cartoonish post-apocalyptic adventure.

The third movie in the series brought an even lighter, sillier tone to the Mad Max movies while 2015’s Fury Road, although more violent and propulsive, was still no more realistic. The Mad Max movies never returned to the grounded believability of the original 1979 movie, whose brutality owed as much to Sam Peckinpah as it did to the sci-fi genre. Director George Miller even admitted that the original Mad Max was only set in the future to save on location shooting costs, which goes a way to explaining why the bleak revenge movie is so much harsher than its goofier sequels.

Related: Why Mad Max Creator George Miller Hated The Original Movie

However, while Mad Max may have been darker than many remember, this didn’t hurt the movie’s box office performance. 1979’s original futuristic thriller Mad Max was a massive box office hit worldwide, raking in millions and making its lead actor an A-list Hollywood star. However, New Zealand viewers would need to wait some time to find out what all the hype was about. New Zealand’s Chief Censor banned Mad Max on the 9th August 1979, thanks to the original movie’s depictions of "violence and anti-social behavior,” according to the Censor's daybooks. It's thought that an attempt by gang members to set one Sergeant Charles O’Hara on fire also led to this ban, as police reports claimed that criminals in the country attempted to burn the officer and his car in a way that supposedly bore a resemblance to Goose's Mad Max death. Though the scene was not officially mentioned in the records that would lead to the movie's temporary ban, the fact it was influenced by events like this was made clear by the re-examination, with the Films Censorship Board of Review stating that Mad Max “could cause gang troubles which would be injurious to the public good”.

Interestingly, The Road Warrior's original twist ending revealed that Goose survived this ordeal, although this didn’t make it into the finished film. However, The Road Warrior's huge success did lead the Film Censorship Board of Review to lift its ban on the original Mad Max in 1983. Though the 1979 movie received an extremely restrictive R18 rating, it was now officially unbanned, which also likely led to less restriction on later movies in the series.

George Miller traveled to New Zealand to testify against the ban during the censorship review process, but his protests went unheard as the Film Censorship Board of Review defended its decision and upheld its ban of Mad Max in 1980. As such, New Zealand movie fans wouldn’t get to see the hit until after its first sequel had been released, which presumably made the confusing timeline of the Mad Max movies even harder to follow. Luckily, none of the goofier, less realistic Mad Max sequels had the same issue with the Film Censorship Board of Review in New Zealand when they arrived at cinema screens years later.

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Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.