The event pictured above is called The Hangover 150, and it's held every New Year's Day at a dirt track near where I live in Western New York. It's a type of "race" called an enduro, in which dozens of stripped down street cars drive around the track for 50 laps with no caution flags. It becomes a survival race as the track becomes clogged with car corpses and the mud takes its toll. There is something utterly apocalyptic about all the burning cars and bleary-eyed spectators cheering on the carnage. At the same time, it's a charity event that contributes several truckloads of food to local pantries every year.

And without further ado, the Apocalypsemobile itself:
I have some work to do over the coming weeks to prep it for the race, so this is like seeing Rocky Balboa before the training montage. It's a '94 Saturn with the upgraded dual overhead cam engine, so it has some kick, especially for a car that only weighs about 2,600 pounds. As you can see, it suffered some war wounds in its prior life, but that's ok. I was just going to weld those doors shut anyway.

We'll keep you updated as the project progresses and the race nears. The car's number, of course, will be io9. We should have room on the body panels to paint on some other sponsors, so if you'd like to be a sponsor for the Apocalypsemobile, drop me a line. All sponsor money will go toward buying me crucial safety equipment, so I don't die.

Before we launch into our awesome list, let's just cop to something: We're not doing the Aristotelian definition of tragedy. We're just not. Aristotle is for wusses. We're going more with the basic definition: the person who has everything, and then loses it all, or just gets horribly fucked over. In a poetic or meaningful way. Okay?

Every scifi hero Charlton Heston played, ever.

The Charlton Heston science fiction oeuvre is splendid in its variety. But there are a few things you can count on in pretty much all of them. Heston will know better than everybody else around him. He'll be the last bastion of civilization, surrounded by dirty hippies or grandiloquent mutants in whiteface or apes or whatever. And in the end, he'll die because nobody ever listens to him when he's telling them how stupid they are. Why? Why won't they listen? Soylent green is people, you damn dirty whiteface cultists! (Okay, so he doesn't die in Planet Of The Apes, but then he does in the sequel.)

Sam Lowry

In Brazil, the fatal flaw that destroys Sam Lowry is his secret desire to escape the repressive system he's a cog in. (Yeah, okay, we're getting Aristotelean for a sec.) He dreams and fantasizes about being a flying hero in shining armor who fights monsters and soars away, but when he finally gets a chance to escape with the woman (literally) of his dreams, it all goes bad. And he winds up being tortured to death by his former best friend.

Dr. Frankenstein

He's obsessed with the idea of bringing inanimate matter to life, to the point where he drops out of school and spends years digging up corpses and sticking them together. But once he's created his monsterpiece (sorry), he rejects it and drives it away. His cruelty to his creation leads to the deaths of several of his friends, so Frankenstein vows to hunt it down. But Frankenstein doesn't even manage to die at the hands of his creation — instead, in the original novel, pneumonia claims his life after he pursues it to the Arctic. He doesn't even manage to die properly!

Henry Jekyll

Another guy who messes with science and gets messed with in return. Jekyll wants to separate his good side from his dark side, so he drinks a potion which turns him into the embodiment of his bad side, Edward Hyde. At first, it's all fun and games, until Hyde starts going buck wild and Jekyll is turning into him at night, even without the potion. But when Jekyll tries to repress Hyde, the monstrous side of him only comes back worse than ever, killing an old man. Finally, he becomes Hyde permanently, and decides to kill himself instead of paying for his crimes.

Winston Smith

He's another cog in the machine, helping to rewrite history in a future totalitarian state where everybody is watched. Because of his doubts about the machine, he gets lured into joining a resistance group — which turns out to be a set-up. He winds up tortured, and gives up his lover and accomplice. In the end, he doesn't die, but he does get utterly broken by the Party.

Jeff Brundle in The Fly

Annnd another hero who suffers due to his curiosity. Brundle invents the perfect teleportation machine, but a fly gets stuck in there with him. He and his little travel buddy get merged genetically, and they wind up as a half-human, half fly monster. So he decides the answer is to merge his body with his pregnant girlfriend, to add more human DNA to the mix. Sadly, the selfish girlfriend escapes and he ends up being merged with a machine instead, becoming a mangled heap.

Chet Kinsman in Ben Bova's Kinsman series.

It's the far-off year of 1999, and the Americans and Russians are sharing a base deep under the surface of the moon. Chet Kinsman is the chief of the American side, and he's got a plan to avert the war back on Earth. And it almost works, except that his best friend, Frank Colt, betrays him and he winds up dying as a result.

Mad Max

Poor old Max — he just wants to pursue justice as a police officer, but his uprightness gets him in the sights of an evil biker gang. And after they torch his best friend Goose, he becomes embittered and quits being a cop. Only to find that there's no safety in being a civilian, in the crumbling post-apocalyptic Australia. The thugs take out his family, leaving him a bitter loner who has no choice but to kill punks of all sizes, occasionally chaining them to their soon-to-explode bikes and giving them saws. He doesn't die, but he does end up getting smacked around by Tina Turner with really bad hair, and then suffers the indignity of getting rescued by a bunch of kids.

Londo Mollari

Lometa at Everything2 has a very passionate argument about why Londo Mollari is the ultimate tragic hero of Babylon 5:

Londo as a tragic hero went through more twists than a bag of pretzels. Born into a noble family Mollari had a good heart, but he was condemned at every turn by his own bad choices. His ascension to the throne as Emperor was bittersweet and in the end he surrendered himself to his greatest fear, death at the hands of a Narn.

Wolverine

We were arguing earlier about whether Wolverine is a tragic hero. He does lose his family and his memory, and then his girlfriend gets killed. He struggles with his berzerker nature and his bestial killing instinct, and people are always trying to make him wear a yellow leotard. Plus, if you believe Wolverine: The End, he's destined to end up a bitter, lonely old man in Canada, before dying in a fight with his evil mutant brother, whom he thought dead.

Hal Jordan

It's all been undone now, but the greatest Green Lantern had a tragic hero arc in the 1990s. Hal Jordan just couldn't stand to fail, so after the evil Mongul destroyed his home town, Hal went nuts and used his power ring to recreate the wrecked Coast City. Then he went berzerk and attacked the Green Lantern Corps and the Guardians. Finally, he renounced his prized Green Lantern-hood and became the villain Parallax. (Later, this was all revealed to be some form of alien possession, but that's a retcon.) Finally, he died, sacrificing himself to save the sun from being eaten.

Dr. Edward Morbius from Forbidden Planet

His curiosity is his downfall — he's determined to study the artifacts of the long-dead Krell race, so he uses the Krells' "Plastic Educator," not realizing that it shapes items from your mind into reality. The Krell wiped themselves out by unleashing monsters from their own ids, and Morbius wipes out his own expedition the same way, except for his daughter. His id-monster is born of his fatal desire to stay and explore the Krell remains, even after the rest of his expedition votes to go home. Finally, he learns the truth and lets the monster kill him, sparing his daughter's life.

Rick Deckard

He's a retired Blade Runner who has to come out of retirement to take up, once again, a job which he no longer really believes in, killing the artificial Replicants. (And if you believe director Ridley Scott, Deckard himself is one of the Replicants he's killing.) In the end, he's with Rachael, another Replicant, but their time together is going to be short and probably not all that pleasant.

Harvey Dent:

Spoilers for the Dark Knight ahead... So stop reading now if you really haven't seen it yet. (Really?) Harvey is another guy there's some debate over. But it's true that in The Dark Knight, he's pretty much one of the good guys, and his insistence on seeing the world in black and white is part of what helps the Joker break him. Even more than losing his fiancee and half his face, it's the realization that the Joker's right and everything is just random chaos that drives him over the edge and leads to his horrible (maybe) demise.

Additional reporting by Lauren Davis.

As we mentioned before, there have been a ton of young-adult postapocalyptic novels, many of them quite disturbing and hardcore. (And our list didn't even mention Uglies or Tripods.) And, Glenn adds:

I can think of a dozen post-apocalyptic movies that I saw as a teen, in the '80s, at the Harvard Square and Orson Welles theaters — including "Planet of the Apes" (1968) and sequels, "The Omega Man" (1971), "Sleeper" (1973), "Death Race 2000" (1975), "A Boy and His Dog" (1975), and of course "Road Warrior" (1981). As hard as it is to believe that adults would go to see "Death Race 2000," though, these movies weren't intended for teen audiences. So they don't count.

There have also been a couple of post-apocalyptic TV shows that seemed aimed at teens: the original "Battlestar Galactica," for example, not to mention "Planet of the Apes." I've never seen "Jericho," so I can't say whether it's aimed at teens. Oh yeah, in England, in the 1980s, there was a short-lived TV adaptation of John Christopher's excellent "Tripod" trilogy.

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Will City of Ember be the first Post Apocalyptic Children's film? [Quiet Earth]
Post-Apocalyptic Kiddie Movies [Boston Globe]

It used to be that if you wanted to get a crazy hairstyle and big shoulder pads and reenact the climactic chase/fight from Road Warrior, you'd have to go to Australia or Japan. But in 2004, a group called Roadwar USA came together to bring the post-apocalyptic road rage to America. The group has done three events so far, starting in the SF Bay area, and another event is planned for the Las Vegas area in June, in conjunction with the Dark Skies/Singularity artists' convention.

The basic format of the Road Warrior reenactments is pretty simple: the Roadwar U.S.A. crew rents a semi truck (an R-series Mack truck with something resembling a fuel tanker), to stand in for the tanker that Max drives at the end of the movie. Then as many Mad Max replica cars, trucks and dune buggies as possible chase the truck down the highway and surround it. The star of the show is usually the black "pursuit special," aka the interceptor or the Black-on-Black (BoB for short.) In the movie, the BoB is a 1973 Ford Falcon GT, a model only sold in Australia. The reenactors have managed to get the exacct same model, only from 1974 instead of 1973. And of course, the BoB has a supercharger ("blower") mounted on its hood.

The participants in the highway chase scene have only gotten arrested once, in San Antonio. Says organizer Karol Bartoszynski:

Basically the media assumed we had "fake machine guns" and looked like we were "attacking" the tanker truck. All we had was [what you can see] in the pics: Roadwarrior-type thing in the truck, a fake crossbow, a pick-axe. People thought the 4-barrel fake gun was a rocket launcher... and we were some kind of militia or terrorists. Most of us spent overnight in jail.

Vehicles usually also include a red pick-up truck, with a snake painted on its side and a gun-wielding maniac riding shotgun. People dress as Wez, with the trademark red mohawk, and as random Bartertown guards. Sometimes there's even a gyrocopter flying above the whole mess.

And the real Wez (Vernon Wells) has turned up for the two most recent Roadwars. The shows also usually include a meeting at a racetrack, a car show, a cruise down the major strip of the local town, and parties.

Karol says he really wanted to have a get-together for Mad Max fans in the U.S., and didn't just want to have people sitting around a conference room eating hotel food and dissecting the deeper meaning of the films:

I just wanted to feel the spirit of the movie and bring people together to help bring that feeling of being IN the movie to life. I'm not against panels, or anything, I just thought it would be cool to have a "chase" be the main piece of the event. That's what Mad Max is all about.

The Descent and Doomsday both focus on women venturing into perilous situations. Do you think it's important that the heroes in your films are women? Do you write women characters differently, or are they just heroes who happen to be women?

It's certainly not some kind of career plan to have my heroes be women, it's just turned out that way. I actually wrote the story for Doomsday several years before I made The Descent. It was one of 3 scripts I tried to get made in the wake of The Descent and it was the one that Rogue Pictures chose to back, so it's really just a coincidence that my new hero is also a woman and I saw no reason to change the character into a man just because of what I'd done previously.

I try to write women as authentically as possible. Above all things, no matter how tough and rugged I make the characters, they should never lose their femininity.

The thing that seems most intriguing to me about Doomsday is that it seems to straddle genre lines, including horror, scifi, medical thriller, etc. Do you think this is true? Are you consciously trying to blend genres?

I love to blend genres. Taking the best elements from different inspirations and throwing them all into the mix is what makes it fun. Besides, I think the lines between genres have often been blurred at best, and that's no bad thing.

Most post-apocalyptic movies nowadays feature monsters (28 days, I Am Legend, etc. ) Are you consciously trying to reclaim post-apocalyptic movies from the monster-movie genre?

Absolutely! It's like there's an unspoken rule in movies now that virus = zombies! Well that's not what post-apocalyptic movies are about for me. It should be about human survival, because the day the next big global pandemic arrives, there won't be any zombies running around, I can promise you that. This is real, terrifying stuff, just as real as nuclear war was when the last great post apocalyptic movies (like The Road Warrior) came out. And that's the kind of gritty, savage world I'm trying to revisit with this movie.

In Doomsday, the lethal Reaper virus nearly wipes out a small country (I think it's England, but the synopses don't make that clear), so the rest of the world walls off that country to keep the virus in. (As far as I can tell, the virus doesn't make you savage or mean, it just kills you, unless you're lucky.) Three decades pass, and the rest of the world remains virus-free. Until one day, the virus turns up in a major city. The authorities send Rhona Mitra into the quarantined country to try and retrieve a cure to the virus by any means necessary. But you just know that if two women enter this country, only one woman will leave. It's that sort of country. Doomsday, directed by Marshall (The Descent, Dog Soldiers) opens March 14 from Universal Pictures.

In Car Wars, scarce resources lead the U.S. government to nationalize oil production, causing a second American Civil War. Three "Free Oil States" spring up with their own oil production — Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. Famine and plagues also hit the world hard, and then the U.S. and the Soviet Union launch World War III. In the wasteland that remains, a bitchin car is a necessity for travel, but people also duel cars for sport. (And the game explains away that you can come back from being destroyed because of advances in cloning and memory "backups.")

The original Car Wars came in a ziploc bag full of rules and information, in 1981. You'd have a certain amount of "money" to spend on your car, and you could allocate it to armor, weapons, engine enhancements, and so on. Here's one fan's explanation of the problems with this points allocation system, which later banned tank guns.

(The game's maker, Steve Jackson Games, claims that a Swedish bus company's recent development of a bus with mini-electric engines in each wheel, fed by a central generator, may have been inspired by one of the enhancements you could add to your car, back in the early 1980s.)

Eventually Car Wars came out with a version for tanks and boats, and even allowed you to add airplanes to the mix. You roll dice to simulate combat, and each player gets to make ten moves per second, including moving, turning, and firing weapons. The more complicated your set of manoeuvres, the higher a score you'd have to roll on a six-sided die to pull off the whole shebang. You would need a rulebook (and a lot of brainpower) to figure out if someone sideswiped you or T-boned you, according to the game's FAQ. It could take hours to play out a few seconds of car-crashing action.

Depending on the size of the map you were playing on, you could use little game counters, Hot Wheels toys, or 1/25th scale miniatures to represent your super-cars.

The game spawned a lousy imitation, Batlecars, as well as a card game version and a computer game, Autoduel.

In the 2002 reissue of the game (which went nowhere), Steve Jackson reduced the amount of moves per second from ten to three, in an attempt to speed up the gameplay and make it less calculated. (And maybe a tad more realistic. Most people don't sit there and go, "Yeah, this second I'm going to honk my horn, and fire my rocket launcher, and turn 15 degrees to the left, and, uh...") The 2002 revision also tried to become quicker because you can only take four hits before your car is toast. But it was too late to bring people back to a dice-based game with mini-cars bashing the hell out of each other. Sadly.

Image by Daniel Ochoa de Olza/AP.

Car chases are woven deep into the DNA of movies, says crime writer Elmore Leonard. We invented cars and movies at around the same time, and both experiences are about speed, exhilaration and technophilia. And you can't write a good car chase — you have to film it. With explosions and crazy weird vehicles. So here are our favorites:

Freejack (1992). Emilio Estevez is a racecar driver, who dies in a car crash. But he doesn't really die, he's kidnapped into the future so Anthony Hopkins can steal his body. Or something. It's all just a set-up for a giant car chase. You can tell it's the distant future because everybody has laptops with video-chat clients in their cars. How else could Estevez tell Jagger he couldn't catch the clap in a whorehouse? CB radio? I also love Jagger giving him driving tips via vid-chat. I want a video Mick Jagger critiquing my driving to be a standard feature in my next car.

Andy Gill, the stunt driver for Freejack also did all the driving for the original Knight Rider, and here are a couple of his favorite stunts:

Death Race 2000 (1975). David Carradine is a super-driver created by the world's greatest surgeons to drive the world's fastest car, which just happens to have jaggedy fake teeth. He's up against Sylvester Stallone in the world's most vicious race, where you win or die. Here's the trailer:

Mad Max: Road Warrior (1981). Mel Gibson is escorting a hella giant oil tanker across the wasteland of post-apocalyptic Australia. But a whole gang of New Wave savages with mohawks and spikes sticking out of their vehicles want to jack him. Crossbows, flaming projectiles, funny helmets and weird-looking machine guns are just some of the weapons they use to try and put Mel off his game, while he gets his swerve on.

Cyber Tracker (1994). Someone in law enforcement took RoboCop a little too seriously, and now all the cops are mean cyborgs. Plus an evil corporation wants to replace political leaders with bots. It's up to Don "The Dragon" Wilson to stop this mess, the only way he knows how... with car chases. Cyborgs are crazy driving fiends in this movie. At one point, a van hits Wilson's car, flips over in mid-air, soars about twenty feet up and then crashes and explodes. Wilson, of course, is unharmed. Cyber-crashes are just better than regular crashes. The shot is so awesome, it appears three different times in the movie's trailer:

Looker (1981). Michael Crichton directed his own weird story about an evil company that scans models and creates perfect computerized facsimiles of them... then disposes of the originals. The company also comes up with a weird hypno raygun that works like roofies... it temporarily blanks out your mind and makes you unable to remember your assailant afterwards. At one point, Albert Finney and a hit-man drive around chasing each other and trying to shoot each other with hypno-rays. D00d, it's drive-by hypno!

Total Recall (1991). This one is more comedy than anything else. Arnie is on the run, with a wet towel around his head to block the tracking device in his skull and a suitcase containing an important secret from Mars. To get way from the spooks chasing him, he steals a JohnnyCab, but first he has to disable the chirpy auto-driver and take control of the joystick steering. Here's the video:

Tomorrow, we'll have the greatest car chases of science fiction from the mid-90s onward. What are your favorites?

Photo by Getty Images.

Tonight: The new Kyle XY episode airs twice, at 8 PM and 9 PM, on ABC Family. Kyle goes home to his adoptive family and decides to tell them the whole truth about his creation. And he starts concocting a plan to defeat the evil Madacorp. Good luck with that.

In tonight's Sarah Connor Chronicles on Fox at 9, Sarah has to deal with some gang members to get fake identities for herself and John. Meanwhile, John sneaks out of the house and tracks down Sarah's hapless ex-fiance (Dean Winters). The episode's title, "Gnothi Seauton," is "Nothing Atone Us" rearranged. Make of that what you will.

Also on Monday, the Sci Fi Channel is having a Star Trek: Enterprise marathon, if you're feeling super-masochistic.

Tuesday night, there's a new (to Americans) episode of the time-travel cop show Life On Mars. A drunken Gene shows up at Sam's house and makes a "shocking confession." That's at 9 PM on BBC America.

Also on Tuesday at 9, the History Channel has a new episode of The Universe. Learn the complete history of dark matter and dark energy, up to now. Probably without actual footage of dark matter at the dawn of time, but you never know.

Wednesday really is sort of a dead zone, but Encore is showing the original Mad Max at 8 PM, maybe without the bizarre dubbed American voices.

Thursday, your only consolation is a Smallville rerun. Plan your Netflix cue accordingly.

Friday, there's a new Flash Gordon at 8, so cancel those evening plans. Flash and the newly sympathetic Princess Aura go on a mission to find the antidote to a new plague that's poisoning the water supply to the Cantons. And there will probably be even more incestuous goo-goo eyes between Aura and her brother Terek.

Also on Friday at 10, there's a new Stargate: Atlantis. A quarantine situation causes a lockdown on Atlantis, and Rodney is trapped in the botany lab with Katie Brown. Characters will bond and work out their relationships while they wait for the lockdown to unlock.

Saturday at 9, the Cartoon Network has two new Naruto episodes back to back. Naruto finally beats the crap out of Sasuke, who acknowledges Naruto's greatness. But then Sasuke gets an upgrade that makes him Naruto's superior. Whatever will Naruto do? (Hint: get his own upgrade.)

Then at 10 PM Saturday, the ever-reliable History Channel has a new MonsterQuest, with the real King Kong. Turns out King Kong's real name is Giganto, and I can see why he changed it.

Also on Saturday at 8, an all-new Alien Abductions: True Confessions on WE. A woman believes she is an alien-human hybrid who spawned an alien baby, and her husband believes they met aboard a spaceship.

Sunday, Flixe has back-to-back Starman and The Man Who Fell To Earth.

• The Cloverfield monster attack lasts at least seven hours. Someone named Beth gets hurt and is trapped in her apartment, and her friends have to go back for her. And someone says they have the choice between dying indoors, dying in the tunnels or dying in the streets, according to new TV spots. [ProjectCloverfield]
• Arnold Schwarzenegger's model of Terminator hasn't been invented yet during the scrapping-with-Skynet days covered in Terminator 4, nor will there be any time travel. But both might pop up in T5 and (god forbid) T6. [CinemaBlend]
• Glimpse the backstory of teleporting outlaw movie Jumper, including Samuel L. Jackson's Paladin character, by reading the first 20 pages of the prequel graphic novel. [Comic Book Resources]
• Oceanic Airways, the fictional airline in Lost, quit flying after Flight 815 crashed but has started up again, according to a dollop of viral marketing. [ComingSoon]
• Quarantine's reporter trapped in a sealed-off building will have more problems to deal with than just rabies-infected mobs. [Shocktillyoudrop]
• The Justice League will be portrayed as Greek gods, or possibly will actually be Greek gods, in George Miller's new movie. It's not clear. [CHUD]
• Get Your Mad Max on by watching a behind-the-scenes clip of the Death Race remake, featuring a "Dreadnaught," half oil truck, half tank. [BloodyDisgusting]
• We'll see a younger version of John Connor in a flashback, plus a Russian thug and a ballerina, in upcoming eps of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. [Terminatorsite]

Famous names: Mel Gibson

Crunchy goodness: 5

Sequels: Mad Max II (aka The Road Warrior), Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome

Sights you'll never unsee: Anorexic, post-apocalyptic apparent space-lizard lounge singer threatening to "stick to (me) like a tire on a licorice road." That sounds painful.

Life lesson: Babies are not very effective speed bumps.

Mad Max Movies FAQ