Saturday, April 7, 2007

Support your local Main Force Patrol: The Bikes of Mad Max.

Full of cool cafe racers, the classic cult film Mad Max, has more Cafe style bikes per footage than any other biker flix. One of the movies main (and later tragic) hero's-the happy-go-lucky "Goose" rides a 1977 Kawasaki KZ1000, or, more correctly, a Kwaka. (Take a close look at the "Kawasaki" badge on the side of the bike when you next see the film and you'll see some clever production designer played
with the lettering)

MAIN FORCE PATROL DOSSIER - SUBJECT: Gosling-1.ASSIGNED DRIVER: James Goose
CALLSIGN: Gosling-1. CLASS: MotoPatrol Pursuit. UNIT:Patrol - Sector 26. VEHICLE NUMBER: MFP MP1.MAKE: Kawasaki 1977 KZ-1000. CURRENT STATUS: Scraped, in repairs

From the Madmax movies site:
"The bikes fairings were supplied by the Melbourne based company La Parisienne, who unfortunately closed up business within a few years of the films release.



This brochure below is from the Japanese company Whitehouse, (editors note: the link is no longer active but see below for more goods) who were making replicas of Jim Goose's bike, including the fairings, the stickers, the helmet - the whole deal as far as I can tell."
Better picts of the whitehouse bike here:
Okay, if we can't find Whitehouse in Japan, we can access the great Mad Max Jp site, it appears from what I can tell, that they have taken over all the original Whitehouse product line and offer a MFP reproduction fairing/seat cowl kit:
Here is a shot of a repro being built up from this Japanese Goose Replica site:


Reproducing the bike not enough for you?- be sure to check out the Japanese MFP Clothing Branch:

The MFP badge

Of course the leather jacket

and the swell stickers...

The Japanese seem to have cornered the market on the Mad Max enthusiasts, even more than the Aussies. This site even features perfectly photoshopped box art of never created Mad Max model kits.


Okay, I'm not one of those creepy motorcycle cop fan-loonies, but you must admit this is all pretty cool stuff nonetheless. My personal taste though leans towards the villains bike- ( to show how awful he is, the lead nasty in the film is called "the toecutter" ), is an identical KZ100 only in black, with rather smart looking blacked out wire wheels.


There are not too many pictures of the other villian's bikes out there, but here's a few from Main Force Patrol:



Had enough?-not yet, here's screenshot of the motorcycles in The PS2 game GTA hacked into the Mad Max bikes.

1 comment:

Raju said...

Thank you for the info. It sounds pretty user friendly. I guess I’ll pick one up for fun. thank u
motorbikes sale melbourne