Making Literature Accessible Through 'Mad Max: Fury Road'

By Alexander Joenks | Think Pieces | November 1, 2016 |

Here at Pajiba, we take literature very seriously. Unfortunately in an age of twitter vines and cat myspaces, the average American reads less than one actual book per year. And 90 percent of the time that book is by Dan fucking Brown. We need to reach the youths. We need to get them reading. And what better way to render classic literature hip to the kids than to adapt books into Fury Road spin offs?

I’m sure there are better ideas, but none of them are getting past a Texas veto on any of the standards committees. I mean, legally fourth graders there still can’t receiving a passing grade in physical fitness without first conducting a cattle raid across an international border (editor’s note: this fact is entirely nonfactual).

So here are our first wave of planned adaptations of classic literature.

Of Mice and Max:
“I had a little baby bunny, and it was perfect in every way!”

The Outsiders
“Stay chrome, warboy”

The Great Maxsby
“So we beat on, war-rigs against the current, borne up ceaselessly into the sky.”

Fear and Loathing in the Wasteland
“We were somewhere around Gastown, on the edge of the desert, when the water began to take hold.”

Mediocre and Mediocrity
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a half dozen wives.”

Hamlet
“For a while even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stopped chewing my windpipe”

The Sound and the Furiosa
“Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.”

The Tragical History of Imperator Faustus
“That’s bait.”

Valhalla Bless You, Mr. Immortan
“Hello, warboys. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and hot in the winter. It’s flat and dry and empty. At the outside, warboys, you’ve got about twenty years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, warboys — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be shiny.’”