Today I learned that Mad Max Fury Road owes its existence to, of all things, ReBoot. Yes, I'm talking about the 90s CG cartoon.
It turns out that the writer of Fury Road, Brendan McCarthy, was always a big fan of the Mad Max movies growing up. So when he was working on ReBoot as a writer/production designer and the show did a Mad Max parody episode ("Bad Bob") he wrote to George Miller to tell him about the parody. From this Miller called him and the two met on a trip to Los Angeles where Miller pitched a Xena/Hercules style Mad Max TV show for McCarthy to come work on. McCarthy basically said "that's a dumb idea, just make another movie."
And so they did like 20 years later, having apparently worked on it off and on since whenever it was in the 90s that all of this happened (for reference, the ReBoot episode in question originally aired in September of 95.
obligatory preparation for people to go "oh my god, the art is awful!" without remembering that this predates Toy Story by like a year, was the first ever full-length CG animated broadcast TV series ever made, and they basically began working on it in like the late 80s/early 90s and it literally took them almost half a decade to get enough episodes for a season order because nobody had any idea how to do any of this and it was all self-taught on the fly as they produced what would go to air (because it was waaaaaaayyyyy too cost-prohibitive to just make a pilot to pitch with. They had to have a full order or nothing at all). Also yes, I am still bitter that the show ended on a damn cliffhanger and the only thing they've done since was an awful in-name-only revival that was more like a bad version of Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad with the ReBoot name plastered on it.
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