Learning Day: Biker Mice From Mars Early Reader Books🌭

The Biker Mice From Mars are a product of the post Ninja Turtles animals plus radioactivity equals radical ripped animals who do extreme sports era. If only that were true, Chernobyl would be so much cooler. They live in Chicago after being kicked out of Mars for, I assume, being too radical. Also they wear slutty little outfits, live together, and I would assume, kiss.

It’s a shame that the mice are so violently allergic to shirts. That must make their love of motorcycling even more dangerous. There were a lot of similar shows in the early ’90s, but for some reason, Biker Mice From Mars has endured in a way that others have not. It’s no Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but it ran for three seasons in the ’90s, got a one-season 2008 reboot, and they’re still making toys and comic books for it today, with talk of another reboot in the works.

What could it be about these Tom Of Finland style mice that people are so attached to? We may never know. There’s just something about them. Some undefinable thing I will not contemplate while looking at this ad for Sports Bro’s Touchdown Modo, complete with bomb blaster football missile and mesmerizingly torn crop top.

I’m not saying the only interesting thing about Biker Mice From Mars is how gay and hot they are. The show also had a pretty incredibly talented voice cast. Ian Ziering, Leah Remini, Michael Dorn, and if there’s a cartoon of questionable taste, you know it’s also going to star The Hawaiian Sweet Roll Movie‘s Mark Hamill. We have a saying in my house, “The Ham Man’s gotta get his bacon.” That means Mark Hamill will voice any cartoon for any amount of money.

I’m not here to talk about Biker Mice From Mars, the TV show, though. I’m here to talk about when these fetish mice were used to attempt to make children think reading is cool. You see, The Biker Mice From Mars has a series of early reader books that could only be sold at the hunkiest Scholastic book fairs.

Could I have attempted to find a book cover that wasn’t covered in spaghetti stains? No, this is a children’s book. They all come like that; that’s how we know it’s authentic. Buzz Books knows children’s books. They’ve worked with all of the greats– Thomas The Tank Engine, Babar, and another anthropomorphic animal who loves a slutty little crop top, Winnie-The-Pooh.

These cartoons are not on the same level as Biker Mice From Mars. I mean, I don’t know what Joshua Jones’s deal is, maybe he’s a mutated sparrow leather daddy paragliding enthusiast. Sorry, googled it, he’s a pale little British man who enjoys doing chores. The mice would eat him alive.

So, let’s look at the content of one of these books. Biker Mice From Mars: Test Of Friendship is based on a script for the TV show, because why write two stories when children’s soft brains will not remember they’ve already seen The Biker Mice From Mars conquer friendship once before. Buzz Books did not have the budget for new sexy mouse stories. They just wanted access to the classics.

We open with one of the main villains, Lawrence Lactavius Limburger, plotting with mad Scientist Karbunkle to contract a third villain named Evil Eye Weevil to make the sexy mice men fight amongst themselves. Meanwhile, completely unknowing of the danger to their special friendship, the mice men play football on motorcycles in what the text says is a deserted baseball stadium, but there’s clearly a football goal post in the background. What makes this even weirder is that in the TV show, they are playing motorcycle soccer, which feels like it makes more sense, but in 1993, an editor probably found it too European for these hyper-masculine mouse friends.

Their game of foot/base/soccerball is interrupted by the wildest radio announcements of all time. The DJ for the rock n’ roll station announces, with all of the sympathy of a wacky waving inflatable tube man, that Lawrence Limburger is going to kill all of the animals in his wildlife preserve. Can, can he do that? If you’re rich enough, can you just buy a bunch of giraffes and then one day decide to throw them into a wood chipper if you get bored? Probably, this is America.

That DJ was having a tough week. “You’re listening to 103.6 The SPLURCH, that was ‘Mmm mmm mmm mmm’ by The Crash Test Dummies, and hey, guess what, local businessman Lawrence Limburger is about to kill a whole bunch of animals, and we’re all powerless to help. Here’s ‘Mmm mmm mmm mmm’ again. I’m so sad!”

The existential crisis DJ is a trap! Lawrence Limburger is going to let the animals live; he’s just using the threat of mass death to lure the Biker Mice From Mars to his wildlife preserve so that Evil Eye Weevil can use his evil eye to make them all mad at each other via a radical stunt jump/eye laser combo. I bet that never happens in Joshua Jones.

So now the sexy mice are all fighting with each other. Boooo! Maybe it would be ok if they fight a little and then kiss, maybe roll around in the mud a little bit, idk. The Biker Mice angrily storm off in different directions, and Lawrence Limburger sends his henchmen to defeat them now that he’s split them up. They manage to capture Modo and Vinnie and tie them up in such a way that we can still see their abs (this is crucial) but not their groins (just makes it hotter).

No one has managed to capture Throttle, though; the leader mouse… the mouse so powerful he’s named after what make motorcycle go. Big mistake! The bitchiness ray only lasts for around an hour, so as soon as it wears off Throttle is headed to save his best friends/roommates/situationships. First, he takes a moment to quietly brood on a moonlit rooftop with his abs out (again, crucial. The third graders that read this book need to understand just how many abs he has).

Throttle jumps from the rooftop straight into the window of Limburger’s evil office space, where he’s keeping The Biker Mice. A scuffle ensues where he manages to turn Evil’s eyeball ray against him, Limburger, and the many other villains introduced at the beginning of this thirty-two-page book. He also uses his creatively named ray-blaster, which looks exactly like a gun, to fire the shackles off of his friends, freeing them. They flex their abs in joy.

Then they all get on their motorcycles, which I guess Limburger kept nearby, and smash another window to exit in a beautiful, tandem motorcycle stunt that symbolizes their unity. There isn’t going to be a single unshattered window left in that skyscraper if Limburger keeps beefing with the hot mice men.

Their temporary breakup has only made this throuple stronger. They arrive home and have a good laugh at how bad Limburger is at killing animals. There’s a whole forest preserve that I guess he owns, which is so full of live giraffes right now, that chump. Why does Limburger own a forest preserve anyway? That’s not very villain-like. Is it just to have a steady supply of giraffes to threaten in the event of an emergency? Third graders will probably not ask these questions. Anyway, the boys decided to kick back and enjoy a sports game by their favorite team, the Chicago Nubs. So close.

Do we think this is a typo for the Chicago Cubs? Or did the Chicago Cubs send a cease and desist so strong they’re not even allowed to have the hot mice say Chicago Cubs? I can’t decide which is more likely.

That is the story of how The Biker Mice from Mars briefly broke up, then got back together. It has everything a third grader could ever want in an early reader book, hot shirtless mice-men, hot shirtless mice-men, and of course, hot shirtless mice-men. All of the children who picked up this book learned something about themselves that they can never unlearn, and so did all of us.

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