The Doof Warrior is still Mad Max: Fury Road’s most iconic image

polygon.com:

Characters like the Doof Warrior don’t come along often. The unofficial mascot of Immortan Joe’s army, and a symbol of the bombast of Mad Max: Fury Road, the masked rocker with the flame-spitting guitar became an instant hit on the internet and received an immediate induction into the movie icon hall of fame.

The Doof Warrior is Mad Max: Fury Road in miniature. Both are combinations of seemingly disparate pieces and random parts, clearly grafted onto one another, but somehow still seamlessly organized to make something perfect and unique. The Doof Warrior is just one of Fury Road’s many miracles, but the story of his creation is also the perfect way to understand how the film reached the legendary status it has today. After all, why wouldn’t the coolest movie of the century so far also have the coolest character in it?

Like the rest of Mad Max: Fury Road, Coma, the Doof Warrior, seems to have come about from the perfect intersection of a wildly ambitious, visionary filmmaker and technically excellent craftspeople.

The idea, as far as anyone seems to remember it, was all director George Miller’s. In Kyle Buchanan’s book about the making of the film, Blood, Sweat, & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road, Miller explained that the character is there to “distill the nature of Fury Road: Kind of wacky but rooted in some sort of reality. He was the equivalent of the drummer or the bugler, with his electric guitar.” Production designer Colin Gibson put it even more succinctly in an interview with MTV News shortly after the movie’s release, saying “Uncle George, being George Miller, imagined the biggest little drummer boy in the world.”

With that idea in mind, Gibson said that his task, as he saw it, was to “build the largest, last Marshall stack at the end of the universe.” And that meant having the apocalypse’s coolest guitar to drive those amps.

For that, Gibson turned to salvage artist Michael Ulman, who did many of the props and vehicles for Fury