Imaginary Worlds - The Set Jet Crowds

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

When a fantasy or sci-fi story is set in a real location, what happens when fans go to that place looking for a glimpse of magic? How do the locals feel about their hometowns turning into fandom destinations? I talk with tour guide Jen Cresswell about why Edinburgh has become a mecca for Harry Potter tours, even though the city is never mentioned in the books. Jelena Šimac is a tour guide in the city of Dubrovnik – a.k.a. King’s Landing on Game of Thrones. She explains how fantasy tourism changed the trajectory of Croatia after years of war and strife. Catherine Farry looks at why the town of Broken Hill has drawn filmmakers to the Australian Outback. And Adrian Bennett tells the story about how he became so enamored with Mad Max, he moved his family 10,000 miles to start a Mad Max Museum in a remote area of The Outback where the post-apocalyptic franchise is filmed. This episode is sponsored by Bombas. Go to www.bombas.com/imaginaryworlds and use the code imaginaryworlds for 20% off your first purchase. s Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection, free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin-conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body.

Hey, it stinks down here. Why do armpits get all of the attention? We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that? Mmm, vanilla and shea. That's Old Spice Total Body Deodorant. 24-7 freshness from pits to privates with daily use. It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief.

I'm Eric Malinsky. When it comes to science fiction or fantasy stories set in New York City, as a New Yorker, I'm a little spoiled. In fact, when a new movie or show is set here, I go in kind of skeptical. I want to make sure they've really taken the time to understand and appreciate the city that they're about to destroy with aliens, robots, demons, or supervillains. Although I do have my moments. If I'm walking between a narrow canyon of skyscrapers, I like to imagine that Spider-Man is swinging between them. Or if a really ominous storm cloud is hanging over Manhattan, I like to think the Ghostbusters are out there, getting ready for work.

But for most places in the world, there is a chasm between their lived experiences and what they see in sci-fi fantasy worlds. So when a show or a movie or a book takes place in their hometown, fans will flock there to feel the magic in that location. There's even a term for this, set jetting. That happened to the town of Forks in Washington State where Twilight takes place. The set of Luke Skywalker's home from episode four has been turned into a hotel. You can actually stay there in Tunisia. And of course, the entire country of New Zealand has attracted fans of Lord of the Rings

ever since the movies were filmed there. I think set jetting is an interesting phenomenon because you're coming to a real place with an imaginary place in your head. Can you get to that point where the real world melts away and you're seeing the fantasy world right in front of you? And what happens to the locals when they find themselves among all these tourists who want to see something that is and isn't there? Let's take a trip around the world to find out. Jen Creswell is a tour guide in Edinburgh, and they have a big tourism industry there around Harry Potter. When I first heard about this, I was confused. Edinburgh is never mentioned in the books.

It's not mentioned in the films either, even though part of the films were filmed in the north of Scotland. So I asked Jen, what's the connection? Well, you do a Harry Potter tour of Edinburgh, and it does come back to J.K. Rowling. I say Edinburgh is the springboard for the Wizarding World. So nothing is a direct copy. Nothing is identical to what you get in the books and the films.

But I think it's that imagination, that spark, that just kind of worked its way into her mind as she was writing the books and researching them. And I think, therefore, you find a lot of Edinburgh in the books. How exactly? So for a lot of people, it's physical. So Edinburgh's got a lot of medieval streets, still got the old town with buildings dating back to the 16th century. We also have a lot of private schools,

which in Scotland are just built like castles. There's no way around it. They've got the turrets, the gargoyles, the towers. So when JK Rowling came to Edinburgh, she moved here after her divorce in Portugal. This was where her sister lived. And I always say to people, it's the only family she really had at the time. She had no contact with her father at that time. And so she needed that family support. She was an unemployed single parent on state benefits. She was suffering from depression. And she says that Edinburgh was good to her.

It helped her, gave her what she needed without setting criteria on that help so that she could reach her full potential and it didn't judge her well she commented on the tours and said oh yes this is all true or like no no this is true no gossip time so she has gone on twitter to say that all the tours are terribly wrong and inaccurate and everything we say is completely wrong she's posted tweets saying people say this is this and it's not i've never been here i've never seen this her daughter went on one tour and apparently laughed throughout all i will say is firstly different guides

different companies all of our tours are slightly different and we've all done different levels of research i don't know which tour they went on i try and make sure everything i say is backed up by interviews or things she has said in the past but also i think given recent opinions of jk rowling um to put it mildly uh which the fans as a general rule definitely do not agree with. I feel like she's now just basically trolling the fans. And I get that sense with Edinburgh because ultimately Harry Potter tourism is not an industry she has any control over. But I find that things that she says has contradicted things she said in previous interviews. So I kind of talk about old JK Rowling as she was when she first came to Edinburgh

when she was writing the books. Because ultimately that is what my tour's about. Her writing the books in Edinburgh, not who she has become. So tell me a bit more about your tours. What are some of the highlights? One of the big highlights is we have this street. Well, it's actually two streets that connect victoria street and westbow it's said to be a key inspiration for diagon alley uh jk

reigning has now gone come out to say it's not but it is identical diagon alley and it's such a beautiful street and so i always do a stop for photographs there and and again i say to people that actually jk reigning has never said what Diagon Alley is inspired by. I believe this is the inspiration. I call it my only maybe on the tour. Welcome, Harry, to Diagon Alley. In the books, Diagon Alley is a narrow street of shops that sell magic items to students at Hogwarts. In the movies, the filming locations for Diagon Alley were

actually in London, but Jen is looking at what may have inspired J.K. Rowling in the first place. Ironically, Harry Potter tourism has actually created a lot of shops in Edinburgh that sell magic wands and other items. This is complete Edinburgh gossip time now, so I hope you've got your gossiping pose to listen into. My gossiping pose? Yes, exactly. Okay. People can't see it.

I got to figure out what this is going to be. My gossiping pose. I think I'm putting my hand on my chin. It's very good. It's very good. For those listening, it is fantastic. So the Royal Mile is full of shops that we call Tart and Tat, which are your souvenir shops. And they're all owned by one family.

And this family has now branched out rather into Harry Potter shops as well. So they've got a chain of Harry Potter shops again throughout the city. And that has changed the city landscape because with these shops going in, a lot of local businesses like small cafes or independent shops can't take those spaces because the rents are so high. And they're really the only family that can afford to move into those places. So they're going in now and instead of putting up another Tata shop, they're now putting in Harry Potter shops. But a few cafes have been thriving. The places where J.K. Rowling used to go to write the Harry Potter books.

At the Elephant House Cafe, a table where J.K. Rowling used to write in the 90s has become a major tourist destination. And Harry Potter tourism has affected historical sites. Like there's an old graveyard called Greyfriars Kirkyard. Like, there's an old graveyard called Greyfriars Kirkyard. The Greyfriars Kirkyard is where there's some graves associated with the Harry Potter books. There's a good view of a school, which is the same type of Hogwarts, this kind of castle-like baronial schools. So many people now go into the graveyard to visit the graves. It's destroying the grass it's they're

having to cordon off areas relay it and then it will get trashed within a few months and it's just absolutely destroying areas around the Tom Riddle grave before they laid the pathway I used to say to my customers um it's going to be we're going to go to 1917 belgium to get to this grave because it was just mud i actually once had to piggyback a customer who was desperate to see the grave but she just wore the wrong shoes so she couldn't get to it so i was like come on probably shouldn't do this piggybacked her to the grave is this one of those things though where like um there's a grade that says tom riddle and jk row's like, I've never seen that grave. I came up with the idea that the name, I've never been there.

So it depends which tour guide you ask, because there are lots of people say, oh yes, this is the grave she got the Potter name from. And this is the grave she got the Scrimgeour name from. And she didn't. The only two that I kind of have some sort of evidence for is McGonagall. Professor McGonagall is named after William McGonagall, who was a real Scottish poet. So he's buried there. And J.K. Rowling said McGonagall is named after William McGonagall. But there is also the Thomas Riddle grave. And

earlier on, J.K. Rowling said she did get the name from the grave and it was a subconscious thing. So she wasn't going, oh, I'm going to use that. She says it must have been subconscious, but now she's saying, no, nothing to do with it. So again, this is current JK Rowling contradicting earlier JK Rowling. Were you saying too that when we were texting or IMing about this, that some tours,

if you want to gossip, some tours make stuff up. I don't think it's so much just make stuff up. I think it's, they see something and go, oh, that must be this. The example I love is, I don't know which guy does this, but I've heard that one guy takes people to a statue of John Knox and go,

this is the inspiration for Dumbledore. It's an old beardy white guy. Edinburgh's full of statues of old beardy white guys. If anything, Dumbledore's the anti-John Knox because John Knox hated magic and witches and women. He was a massive misogynist. But I think a lot of people try and pad out their tours by making them to be more in Edinburgh than there actually is.

It's great that you're able to positively refr reframe, you know, the whole story around J.K. Rowling and the books, because I mean, online, if I ever see her trending on Twitter, you know, it's going to feel like a really ugly scene. It's like, oh, my God, what does she say now? You know, everyone's really upset. And I know like for some Harry Potter fans, they feel like she's kind of spoiled their feelings about the wizarding world so i mean i'm glad to see that you you're able to like keep the magic alive

you know to some extent i and i get i can only speak for myself while i'm part of the lgbt community i'm not trans i try and be a trans ally but i can never have that experience and i can never tell a trans person how they should or shouldn't react. When I do my tours I stay up front. I say you know she has said a lot of very controversial things and the majority of people in Edinburgh disagree with that. I don't mention explicitly trans issues because people on the tours are on their own journeys especially people with families and I don't know if they've got a family member who's trans or on that journey. And that's a conversation they want to have with their children. So I never say explicitly, I always wear a trans pin. So people know where

I stand on the situation. That makes sense. I mean, I still think it's a fascinating thing that it's where she wrote the books but but she is denied almost almost everything except a two a two couple coupled examples of like oh no no no okay fine yes i'll admit it i got that name from there but that there's this massive tourism industry there and people looking to see the magic in there that the author put in there even though the author herself is like no no there's nothing there i just think that's totally fascinating it is bizarre and it doesn't make the job easier sometimes. When she says something like that, you're just like,

I've got to rewrite this stop now. You know, often inspiration works on a subconscious level. And I think a lot of that has happened with J.K. Rowling. She's seeing a huge Scottish private school in a similar structure to a castle every day and then she writes a book about a huge Scottish private school in a castle and she's there going yeah no connection and if I'm honest when you create a fantasy work it's beautiful to let it explore by the fans to see what they want to see and then to go on their own journeys with

the characters I honestly think that's the greatest compliment anyone can give you in that your work is so rich that people can get so much out of it things that you never probably realized or intended to put in I wouldn't say I feel sad for her but I think she's missing a wonderful opportunity of bringing fans in engaging with them and, how do you see this developing? What do you think about this? I honestly think she's built a barrier up. And I think it's largely because the fans are now so much bigger than she is. Next stop on our world tour, Croatia.

If you've watched Game of Thrones, you have seen the city of Dubrovnik. That's where they film the scenes of King's Landing, which is the capital city in the mythical land of Westeros. Fans have come from around the world to take pictures of themselves in Dubrovnik, right where their favorite characters stood, or got beheaded, or poisoned, or burnt alive by a dragon. Jelena Simak is a tour guide in Dubrovnik, and she gives tours to Game of Thrones fans. When she was younger, she wanted to be a history teacher, and she was a journalist for a while, but she felt like she really couldn't earn enough money with either

career, at least not in Croatia. And then her husband suggested that she try being a tour guide. At first, she just did historical tours. With Game of Thrones, it also, it wasn't planned at all because I was first doing only historical tours. But then I realized I was getting more and more people on my tours who were interested in Game of Thrones, filming locations, filming of it in Dubrovnik. And I was like, OK, I could watch the show because, you know, I want to be able to answer the questions of my guests. But then I got totally addicted to it. She was also surprised to discover how much she enjoys being a tour guide. She gets to work outside when the weather's nice, and she loves meeting people from around the world.

But there are logistical problems to these tours. The part of the city where they filmed Game of Thrones is over 500 years old. Some of the architecture is fragile. We're trying to deal with that by limiting the number of the cruise ships coming at the same time to Dubrovnik. Why? Because you have a situation that you have thousands and thousands of people all moving in the same direction and wanting to see the same things. What are some of the places in the show that you show them, like the specific steps or specific locations that they're like, oh, my God, that's it.

We're right here. I can't believe we're standing right here. Oh, yes. The most popular one is definitely Circe's Walk of Shame, a film on the beautiful Jesuit steps in Dubrovnik. If you haven't seen the show, this is a scene where a member of the royal family, who has done horrible things, is forced by religious zealots to walk naked in front of her subjects. That's definitely a hot spot to be visited if you're a Game of Thrones fan. There are a lot of people there who are actually recreating the scene. Maybe not entirely naked. I saw a guest, Maybe not entirely naked. I saw a guest, a random guest, not the guest on my tour.

She did it in her bodding suit in the color of her skin. So it seemed like she did it naked, you know, and making a video. Yeah. Of the whole scene of the whole walk of shame. Yeah. Geoffrey's wedding celebration. So the place where he was poisoned. Those are all of the places that are definitely fascinating to every Game of Thrones fan that comes to Dubrovnik. Do you remember when they were filming the show?

Oh, of course I do. Yeah, what was that like? I mean, do you remember what were you seeing? Game of Thrones in Dubrovnik to be guessing the scene, which was going to be filmed here or there. We would love to see House of the Dragon being filmed in Dubrovnik as well. Oh, it's not filmed in Dubrovnik? No, no. The first season, no. Let's see what happens with the next one. Really?

That's so funny because it takes place in King's Landing. I'm surprised they don't film it in Dubrovnik. There are a lot of indoor scenes, you know, in that show. It was mostly about building up the characters, I would say, in that season. So let's see what happens in the next seasons of that show. Maybe we're going to see them back here in this city. Well, the good thing, though, is I'm sure because of House of the Dragon,

it's kept Game of Thrones into people's minds. I totally thought they filmed it in Dubrovnik. So I mean, if I wanted to go see Game of Thrones, I think there was still new Dubrovnik stuff happening. Don't tell this to our guests. Okay, I won't. It's a secret. She's joking, of course. But Croatia is more dependent on tourism than any other country in the European Union. And that's not because Croatia is getting more tourists. It's because Croatia came onto the world stage fairly recently. For most of the 20th century, Croatia was part of Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia was a communist nation. It wasn't entirely behind the Iron Curtain, but it was formidable to Western tourists. After the fall of the Soviet Empire, Yugoslavia collapsed into a series of internal wars, which lasted for a decade. When Game of Thrones first came on the air in 2011, Croatia had been peaceful for a while. But Jelena says people were still feeling isolated. We went through some really tough time. It was four years of war in Croatia. Our cities were destroyed. Our industry was destroyed.

Of course, no tourists in that time, no tourism at all, practically. When we started to recover after the war, it happened really quickly actually here. The biggest problem here was to change the mindset of people, you know, from thinking, let's say, communist sort of way to capitalist, you know. For me, I was always looking for a new boss in my life. It took me a lot of years to realize I don't need to be searching for a boss. I could be my own boss. So it takes a lot of time to change that mindset of people. Yeah, that's actually really interesting, the idea of shifting the mindset from communism,

not just to capitalism, but you have this very entertainment. Now with Game of Thrones, it's this entertainment based capitalism of this fantasy story, which ironically is about a feudal system. But it's a very like, you know, Hollywood or Western style of a little bit of show business capitalism is very different from just plain old capitalism. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. It is very different. After the war, when we started rebuilding our cities and when people realized that things have changed here, it was like the world started discovering Croatia, finally. Yeah, it was a big, it was a sudden change, I'm going to tell you that, but it was a good change for us because it gave us, you know,

in that post-war period, people, a lot of people were jobless. You're working for a really low salary if you manage to find a work at all. No, not a lot of options you have with things to do in your life. You're kind of totally limited. And it gave us a new hope. I see these new generations here in Dubrovnik. They all have their plans of what to do with their lives. In the post-war period, we didn't have plans at all.

We were just living day by day, you know. It was all about, you know, surviving, not a lot of thinking about the future. The height of tourism was in 2019. There were big parties for the series finale of Game of Thrones, and they showed the final episode on screens throughout the old city. and they showed the final episode on screens throughout the old city. So how good things were going in 2019 with Game of Thrones. Dubrovnik extended its season basically on the winter months as well.

We were having a lot of flights in the winter. We were really happy about it because Dubrovnik can be really isolated in the winter months from the rest of the world. It's really hard to reach, unfortunately. And so there were more and more flights in 2019 in the winter with a lot of very optimistic plans for 2020 and then all canceled. It was when I started receiving all of those cancellations for my tours, when the pandemic was announced. I was really sad about it, like everybody here in Dubrovnik.

And then we thought, okay, one year you can survive it. And then the next year came and it was really hard on us because, you know, like you're living on what you saved in the good years, but that's not going to last. I'm going to tell you, we were mostly saved by the American guests, especially in the first summer of the pandemic, was the only country of European Union accepting American guests in Dubrovnik, in Croatia. I mean, a lot of American guests who actually,

we could easily say, saved our tourist season. Wow, that makes me feel almost patriotic. I mean, yeah, Americans along with the British are top guests in Dubrovnik. Can you talk a little bit more, too, just about how these Game of Thrones tours have changed your life? In a lot of great ways. Yeah, tell me. I told you, I mean, first of all, it gave me an opportunity to become my own boss.

That was a great thing that happened to me. thing that happened to me and when I realized I could blend it with the history it was it was the best thing that's happened to me because it was my personal renaissance to be honest with you Eric I started earning normal money I was doing the job I love I was working I am working with the great people it was the best thing that happened to me. We have a long virtual flight ahead of us, so let's take a break. When we get back, we'll land in a tiny town in the Australian outback, just beyond the Thunderdome. What's it like to trade crypto on Kraken?

Let's say I'm in a state-of-the-art gym surrounded by powerful-looking machines. Do I head straight for the squat rack? I could, but this gym has options, like trainers, fitness pros, spotters to back me up. That's crypto on Kraken, powerful crypto tools backed by 24-7 support and multi-layered security.

Go to Kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Non-investment advice. Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See Kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. Catherine Ferry is a listener who lives in the town of Broken Hill, which is deep in the Australian outback. The population of Broken Hill is just over 17,000 people, but they get hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. And dozens of movies and shows have been filmed there. Many of these stories are about characters who struggle to survive. Catherine thinks this part of Australia holds a special place in the imagination of people who live in the coastal cities.

I think that because it is so isolated, when you drive, you'll go for hours without coming to a town. So, yeah, and if you break down that you'll be stuck in the middle of nowhere. And, you know, and people do die on a fairly regular basis where their car breaks down off the main roads and they die of heat or exhaustion or those sorts of things. It is actually a real thing. I think when people aren't used to so much space, it can actually disconcert people, I suppose, for lack of a better word. You find it quite disturbing. But one of the most famous movies set in the outback was a comedy. How long have we been on the road?

Four and a half hours. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a film from 1994 about two drag queens and a transgender woman who go on a road trip. What have we got here, eh? A couple of showgirls, have we? When they get to Broken Hill, the characters face homophobic abuse from some of the locals. But the tone of the film is uplifting and joyful. In fact, the movie is so popular, and they get so many fans coming to Broken Hill,

they now have an annual drag fest. Honestly, if you'd told me, you know, 15 years ago, 20 years ago that, you know, we'd have an annual drag festival, I would have, yeah, thought there's absolutely no way. But yeah, it's become a regular feature on the annual calendar. And yeah, and from that, it's sort of, we've now got resident drag queens, basically. So, you know, people who live here who make a living out of, you know, things for tourists. They have drag bingo. There was drag karaoke.

There was, you know. But the biggest movie franchise that's still being filmed in this area is Mad Max. The first movie was a sleeper hit in 1979. The sequel in 1981, which was called The Road Warrior in the U.S., turned Mad Max into a global phenomenon. In the future, cities will become deserts, roads will become battlefields. And the hope of mankind will appear as a stranger. And they recently finished filming a spinoff movie about the character Furiosa, who is in the 2015 film Mad Max Fury Road. There is also a Mad Max museum now that's been established, which was set up by a man from Yorkshire who decided

to move his whole family out to the outback and set up this museum. Have you been to this museum? Yes. Yeah, no, it is. It's fantastic. Yeah. What is it like? Tell me.

Yeah, it's only quite small, but you go in and the, I suppose the reception area is just plastered with photos from the filming, which Adrian is the name of the chap who set it all up. And he's managed to get quite a number of the vehicles that were used for the filming. You know, they sort of patched together sort of strange vehicles. When I was in high school, I used to watch the videotape of The Road Warrior over and over again. It was one of my favorite movies to watch in high school. Yes, it's a cracker of a film. I remember I saw it when I was about eight, and I think that was when it came out, and I just, oh, just in love, you know, like, yes.

I had to talk to this man who moved to the outback to create a Mad Max museum. Although I learned later on that the museum is specifically focused on Mad Max 2, the Road Warrior. And the museum is in Silverton, which is the closest town to Broken Hill. The population of Silverton is 50 people, including Adrian Bennett and his wife. Adrian first saw Mad Max and Mad Max 2 when he was growing up in the north of England. His friends had dragged him to the cinema to watch a double feature of these Australian films that he had never heard of. I went there with a little bit of an attitude, thinking, oh, this is going to be rubbish, you know. And anyway, so I goes in there.

You know, I never even looked at the poster, so I had no idea what to expect. So I was going in there completely blind. Yeah, so I gets in there and I couldn't believe it. I was so taken by what I'd seen. And my friends were laughing at me afterwards, you know, when I came out, they said, oh, we were looking at your face when you were watching the film. They said, your eyes were like saucers and your jaw was on the floor, you know. And it grabbed a hold of me. For the next two decades, he kept his fandom alive in different ways.

He built a replica of one of the cars in Mad Max, which is called The Interceptor. He even named two of his sons after crew members from the films. But during this time, his real goal was to see the landscape of Mad Max in real life. So we got to a point where the kids were growing up and we were in a position where we could

actually visit Australia. This was 2004, so it's quite a long time after the film. We got into Silverton. We came through Broken Hill, got into Silverton. We grabbed a beer at the Silverton Hotel, the famous Silverton Hotel, and then we drove out to the Monday Monday Lookout, which is a very famous lookout used in the film and other films as well, like Razorback and Priscilla. But I got to the lookout and I couldn't believe it. I got all goose bumpy and the hairs went up on the back of my neck and I couldn't believe I was stood where, in this famous area,

you know, where Max had stood and where some of the scenes were shot. And I just turned to my wife, Linda, and I just said, do you think you could live here? Well, would never happen she said yes so there there was the first mistake so that was it so we returned back to the UK and then started the ball rolling to to come and live here so the idea was to move first when did you come up with the idea for the museum well it originally came well it wasn't such the idea that came but it was just a thought i had when when we first came on holiday i mean i was really excited to be here but but i just found it really odd that there was really nothing here at all actually to pay homage to any of the the big iconic movies that have been shot here and especially mad max

two and i thought well and it was only an idea just a dream i mean i was lucky lucky enough to get to australia let alone to think i could ever move out here but I just thought to myself if I am lucky enough to ever move either to Broken Hill or Silverton but preferably Silverton because we're more in the outback I had this idea that I would at least try and do some type of display so when we got here in September of 2009, we bought a property. And of course, as part of that property, the garden was quite a big garden or quite a big yard. And so we divided it into and decided to, I decided, look, I'm going to put this building up. And fingers crossed, I can fill it.

I can actually start to fill it with memorabilia. The first thing I was given was actually quite a lot of photographs taken by some of the locals that were that were actually in the movie so in the meantime of waiting and hoping that things would start to turn up i just started to to put these photographs up and start to make the display we'd gather enough things to warrant opening the doors but i was never happy i suppose now 12 years on i'm probably the happiest that i've been because we've pretty much covered all bases, but it's taken 12 years to get to this point. Until this point, I thought, oh, well, I could do with this and I could do with that. And, you know, is it really good enough? You know, and I was, I suppose I was doubting myself, you know, people that were coming through the door were telling me, you know, this is brilliant, this is brilliant, but I was never really happy with it.

But now I am. Tell me a bit more about that. What were the doubts that you were having as you were building it? What were you concerned about? You know, if I was letting people, if people were coming through here for free, that's different, you know, just, it didn't matter. But the fact that we do have to charge an admission fee, because we put everything we had into this place, right? We weren't rich people. And actually, everything now still goes back into the place. That's the thing, you know, we want to, we just want to want to want to keep it interesting for people. But, but it was really that it was just really doubting myself to whether whether it was worthy of opening up, you know. But but when when when we had people, visitors and tourists and even locals coming through this admit that you've done a great job.

Was there any one particular piece that you bought, you know, like one day you're hanging up a picture or you're looking at a prop or something that you were like, okay, I think I've turned the corner with this specific thing. There was actually, and it's funny because it's not something big. Because when people say to me, what was the pace that really did it for you? And they expect me to say, oh, this card or this or this. It was when the sound mixer, Bruce Lamshet, who won an Australian Film Institute award for the sound on this film. Bruce contacted us, but he'd kept the boomerang, metal boomerang, and the original Happy Birthday music box from Mad Max 2 to take the sound from. Now, these are only small pieces, but everybody

remembers the boomerang and the feral kid. If you haven't seen the second Mad Max movie, there's a little kid who grew up in this post-apocalyptic world. He looks like he's never had a haircut. He doesn't even know language. And he throws a silver boomerang, which is so sharp, it can kill members of an evil punk biker gang. Later on, Max wins over the kid with the music box. Now, they were quite expensive,

and it was a bit of a shock when he first told us exactly how much he wanted for them. But I thought, no, we have to get these pieces. And people ask me now, they say, do you have a favourite piece? And I say, well, there isn't a favourite piece I have, but if I had to grab something quickly and run, it would definitely be the boomerang and the music box. Were you able to see Fury Road or Furiosa being filmed? I feel like they should have given you a cameo or something.

Well, you know, it's funny. It's funny, Eric, because I've waited 40 years to be in a Mad Max movie. because I've waited 40 years to be in a Mad Max movie, and when they put out the brief for what they needed for extras, it turned out that I was too old, too fat, and too many tattoos. And I was too fat by two inches. I'm a 34-inch waist, and they wanted 32. But we did get an invite out there to the set. Now, unfortunately for me, I couldn't go,

because the museum for me, Eric, is priority. And it was very, very busy at the time. It was on a Saturday and there was no way I could close the doors. So I said to Linda, I said, look, why don't you go out there, take the grandson, Zanon, and take his other son, Grant. And so they did. So they went out there and they actually had a quick chat with George Miller. But they were taken out. They were really well looked after.

This was fantastic. So they were taken out to the base camp which is just beyond the Monday Monday lookout and then they were taken on a mini bus out to the set so but unfortunately I didn't um I didn't get to see didn't get to see anything but we did have some of the other actors come through and the crew members came through here and they literally bought nearly all our t-shirt supplies, but it's put us in this great position now where, you know,

we get to meet wonderful people through the day and then we've got all the peace and tranquility and a, and a sky full of stars on a night, which is, which is fantastic. You know, it's just, I'm,

I'm, I'm where I want to be doing what I want to do. So there's nothing else, you know, if somebody says to me, what would you like to do if you had $10 million? I said, well,

I'm doing it now and I don't need the 10 million dollars i'm so happy to you know wake up every morning and be able to talk to people about you know a film i'm passionate about and a film that they're passionate about and you know you make good friends so i've got no complaints if i tell you what if i complained about anything eric i'd have to have a few good words with myself you know because i'm i've ended up in a position where I should be just grateful for, you know, for everything. So and that's how I feel, you know, which is I'm pretty lucky in that respect. There's an old joke or cliche where at the end of a story, the character says, you know, the real treasure was the friends we made along the way.

But this case, it's kind of true. One of the most consistent things that I heard from people is that while they really appreciate the money that comes from tourism, when the tourists are gone, they also feel very isolated. I mean, it's great to have these moments where you go to a location and you feel like you're right there in the movie or the show. But after the fantasy melts away and you start to discover the real people who actually live there, that can be another kind of magical moment too. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Jen Creswell, Yelena Shemek, Catherine Ferry, and Adrienne Bennett. By the way, if Jen's voice sounded familiar,

she was in my episode Toy Stories from 2020. I have links to their tours in the Mad Max Museum in the show notes. Also thanks to Joel Sund and the listeners who suggested this idea. If you really liked this episode, you should check out my episode The Real Twin Peaks from 2017. It's about people who live in the towns where Twin Peaks was filmed and how the show affected their lives. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. And if you'd like to advertise on Imaginary Worlds, let us know at contact at imaginaryworldspodcast.org. And I'll put you in touch with our ad coordinator.

The best way to support the show is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you can get either free Imaginary World stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which is the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can also get access

to an ad-free version of the show through Patreon, and you can buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at imaginaryworldspodcast.org.