Mad Max: Fury Road's Flamethrower Guitar Actually Worked

"Mad Max: Fury Road" is one of the biggest miracles of modern cinema. This is a film that could have gone wrong so many times (and actually kind of did), where most of the stunt crew could have died several times over, a movie that against all odds not only got made, but it was as perfect as a movie can be — as decreed by /Film.

George Miller's masterpiece particularly perfected the art of visual storytelling, delivering a movie that works just as well without any dialogue: a movie that tells you everything you need or would want to know about its world, its people, and its cultures with imagery rather than exposition (other than a brief recap of the state of the world in the beginning). Take what is probably the weirdest and coolest of the many, many side characters in the movie, whom we understand without having to hear a single word of dialogue from him: Coma-Doof Warrior, also known as the guy with the flamethrower guitar.

It's an impossibly badass character: one that shouldn't work, let alone be physically possible to film without CGI. And yet, the guitar was a practical prop and entirely functional — flames and all. As production designer Colin Gibson told MTV News when the film came out:

"George — unfortunately — doesn't like things that don't work. I have in the past built him props that I thought were just supposed to be props, and then he goes, 'Okay, plug it in now.' [...] And yes, the flame-throwing guitar did have to operate, did have to play, the PA system did have to work and the drummers ... Unfortunately, I did get practice in all positions and I've got to tell you, the drumming was very uncomfortable at 70 [kilometers] an hour, eating sand."

As for the actual Doof Warrior, musician iOTA told Audiences Everywhere back in 2015 that the flamethrower was controlled by a whammy bar, but while the flames were real, the music left a lot to be desired.

"Yeah, Well, it made a noise. You wouldn't want to do an album with it. It was pretty s**t. It made a great sound and, to me, it felt perfect for the environment. In the sun and the dust in the cold, it was perfect. But it was always going to be a bit s**t."

Of course, what is the coolest musician in the apocalypse without the coolest and most disturbing backstory? In that same interview, iOTA revealed the backstory for Coma-Doof Warrior. "Coma was found with his mother's head, after she had been killed," he said. "He was clinging to it and Immortan Joe came and found him and Coma took her face off and made the mask out of her face, to honor her when he went to war."

That's right, the mask he's wearing all the time is the actual face of Coma's mother. This means he is a live-action, humanoid version of Cubone, the Pokémon who wears the skull of its dead mother — making "Mad Max: Fury Road" secretly a "Pokémon" movie.