The scene: a turn of the century (19th to 20th that is) saloon. People are chatting, playing games and enjoying drinks. Their clothes have lost their past lustre and are a bit dirty in tatty in palces but they're still making an effort to be reasonably well dressed.
An old man, wearing one of those visors you'd see card dealers wearing, is approached by another man, who says he wants some money and offers an item in trade. The old guy goes to his cash desk and counts out a handful of bizarre, handmade coins with numbers scratched into them, and hands them to the other man.
Shortly afterwards, there's a disturbance outside, and the ground floor window into the bar is smashed. Enter another man, pursued by another, scruffier man with enormous, dirty, wild hair (think of The Cat in Red Dwarf when he lost his vanity). Wearing his trademark leather jacket, it's Mel Gibson, as Mad Max. Max isn't happy with someone who has just tried cheat him on a trade.
A small fight ensues, and eventually the saloon inhabitants manage to force Max outside and talk him down. Standing in the parking lot outside, filled with a variety of suitably customized vehicles for the setting, they explain to him. With the worsening war situation, the government just couldn't afford to support the smaller communities like this one (illustrated by a man sweeping his hand across the valley below the hill on which they're standing, which contains a small town). Public services like ambulance, police and fire were pulled out, followed by garbage collection and maintenance. Once, he said, the tram men (a term that made perfect sense in the dream) were gone, people couldn't even get around easily and that was it, they were basically cut off and left to their own devices.
The little community has tried to take care of itself, but government-issued money is pointless here and so they've had to resort to bartering. As if to illustrate, a guy passes at this point and goes into a small house. Inside, her face covered by a veil, is a young woman with enormous hair - a young Auntie Entity. The guy asks for her to mediate a dispute. She somehow randomly decides it's 'Aunties' Choice' (as per the option seen on the wheel later outside the Thunderdome) and illustrates this by allowing the man to reach into a small box next to her and retrieve an object about the size of a can bundled up in white cloth. For some reason that I'll never understand, this both satisfies and delights the man, who runs out of the house clutching the bundle and cackling with glee.
He passes Max, who is being told by the villagers he's better off going back to the coast and civilization, as things get worse the further inland you go. Some communities, they tell him, are all but trapped out there and people are starting to go crazy, with delivery trucks heading that way never returning (as evidenced from the start of the Road Warrior where Max finds the ransacked tractor trailer with its recently-killed driver). Max grumbles and gets back in his car, driving off heading into the outback. The villagers shrug and return to the saloon, angry that angsty idiot broke their window and that a new frosted glass window will be hard to come by nowadays.
At this point, the black and white narrated montage from the start of the Road Warrior began and I thought to myself "why had I never seen that sequence before?".
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