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Nerding Day: Armored MMA
Author: Lydia Bugg
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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.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Armando Nava, a cooler biker mouse from Phobos. 300% hunkier and with half as much shirt.
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Nerding Day: Human Vs. Hamster🌭
From the celebrity power couple who brought you a beige rug that costs eight thousand dollars, a set of beige mixing bowls for ninety dollars, and a game of Connect Four vastly improved by being made colorless and impossible to play, also it’s a hundred and fifty dollars (down from $190!), comes an exciting new game show! You’re never going to believe which one it is.
You would think that Chip and Joanna Gaines, the media moguls who turned their HGTV show Fixer Upper into several retail stores, a line at Target, a magazine, and finally, their own television channel, would only create sad beige game shows. I’m picturing an oatmeal eating competition? Maybe something where women compete to see who can clap the politest. No, Chip and Joanna Gaines somehow became the executive producers of Human vs. Hamster, one of the least dignified shows on television and as we all know MILF Manor exists, so that’s really saying something.
Chip and Joanna Gaines are so famous that if you ask a certain group of young women what they know about Waco, Texas, they will say, “It’s the home of Chip and Joanna Gaines!” and nothing else. They think of beige Connect Four when they think of Waco, and I’m sure the tourism board of Waco, Texas, could not be more thrilled about that.
The Magnolia Network, which Chip and Joanna run, is primarily focused on home decoration but expanded into a few food shows, and then in 2024, it expanded into hamster. Human vs. Hamster is a show that really tests the limits of what humans are willing to do for a very small amount of prize money. Most contestants walk away with two or three grand; if a team does really well, they might take home around eight grand split two ways, which isn’t nothing, but I would need a lot more money to gnaw through a noodle rope on television.
The premise of the show is that Chip and Joanna Gaines have built Saw-like games and obstacle courses for hamsters and then scaled them up exactly to human size. Humans have to run on a hamster wheel to raise a rocket ship to a tiny fake moon; they tumble through a forest of 150-pound juice boxes and balance on giant dominoes. Sometimes, there are side challenges where they have to do things hamsters are known for, like squeeze into a bottle or eat corn fast. I guess that’s a thing I think of when I think of hamsters? There’s no competition to struggle against being dropped by a giant ten-year-old, which we all know is really a hamster’s greatest challenge.
Human vs. Hamster treated its contestants with a wide range of dignity. When they had teachers and nurses on, the vibe was, “Wow, you’re all such heroes, ok now squeeze into the glass bottle like a hamster as quickly as you can, hero!” Which, I guess, is the respect we should give to public servants before we make them squeeze into a bottle because that’s a thing hamsters do.
However, when magicians and dancers come on the show, they force them to eat garbage in almost every competition. They’re chewing the pasta rope. They’re facing off against a hamster in a corn-on-the-cob eating challenge. An adult man is crawling around a maze to locate a very cold-looking slice of pizza and a stale cookie to eat. A lot of people were concerned about how the Hamsters were treated during filming. I’m concerned about the magicians, a phrase I have written many times before, but never in a sympathetic way.
Someone claiming to be a contestant on the show said on Reddit that the hamsters were recorded separately, and the humans simply competed against their times. So, I guess don’t worry about hamsters being harmed in the making of this show. They’re doing normal hamster stuff. It’s basically The Real Housewives Of Hamster for them.
Let’s talk about the energy the hosts are bringing to the show. It’s hosted by SNL’s Sarah Sherman, Kyle Brandt, who I’m told is some sort of football man, and in-house hamster expert, Brian Balthazar. Sarah Sherman seems almost uncomfortable with the forced hamsterization of the contestants, while the football man has never been more comfortable with anything in his entire life. If he could force-feed plain spaghetti to the magicians all day, he totally would. Brian Balthazar is there for the pageantry of the show. He pops in with elaborate background stories for each competing hamster and real hamster facts, and then I’m sure he goes back to his trailer and never thinks about hamsters for even one more second of the day. I guess I’m proud of him?
Sarah and the football man do commentary while the contestants battle the hamsters, and you can tell it’s really hard to make a person crawling through a little ball maze to find pizza slices not sound dystopian and terrible. Sarah clearly struggles with it. The football man grew up in Head Injury City, so this looks like a kindness to him. Chip and Joanna tried to give the show an American Gladiators feel, which is kind of funny, but also, it’s really hard to shit-talk a hamster or to create any kind of urgency or drama around the idea that humanity must prove ourselves against these hamsters. You can’t fight an animal named Ham without looking ridiculous.
There’s no amount of hamsters I’m afraid of. I think a human could kill nine million hamsters without even trying. The tasks are specifically designed for hamsters to be good at and humans to find difficult, and still, the hamsters lose sometimes, mainly because they have no idea that they’re on a competition show. They’ll stop to take a bath for five minutes while a human dangles precariously from a ladder. It doesn’t look good for anyone. There are truly no winners here. Both human and hamster come out looking like douchebags.
Ok, so one species is losing a little more. They should make the hamsters do some human stuff. Redesign this 1950s kitchen with a modern farmhouse aesthetic, hamster. Oh, you’re colorblind? Wow, that’s probably going to make things really difficult for you. Kind of like how it’s hard for these poor dentists with inflexible spines to quickly move through a series of tunnels in pursuit of a toy badger, dick. Sorry, I’m not sure why I suddenly got so mad at the hamsters. It’s not like they produced the show.
It would have made so much more sense if the show were about Joanna Gaines training hamsters to do interior design. The few months The Magnolia Channel spent promoting Human vs. Hamster on social media were so chaotic. Look at this snap of their Instagram grid. You’ve got a sweet potato casserole in a beautiful rustic casserole dish, then two women chowing down on corn like their life depends on it, locked in battle with a fancy rat. A gorgeous, curated breakfast nook, and Sarah Sherman about to force a man to chase a hamster through a series of plastic tubes. Joanna Gaines probably saw this grid and canceled the show herself.
The Magnolia Channel attempted two other competition shows at the same time as Human vs. Hamster. One of them was an artistic roller skating show called Roller Jam, so they were really taking some big swings. The third was a fairly typical singing competition, but like the other two competition shows, it also failed to get renewed. In fact, rumor has it that The Magnolia Network might not be doing so well.
My theory on what happened here is that we should blame Discovery CEO David Zaslav. He had a hand in creating The Magnolia Network and Human vs. Hamster has his fingerprints all over it. Chip and Joanna got some bad business advice from a friend whose idea of great art is 90 Day Fiance. They’ll be fine, though. There will always be people who want to buy beige mixing bowls. The audience for people who want to watch their fellow humans crawl around in hamster tubes for three thousand dollars is, thankfully, a lot smaller.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Craig Lemoine, who will absolutely destroy any amount of hamsters you throw at him. He’s done it before, and he’ll do it again.
This is the story of the most British television program ever to exist. It’s got everything I associate with Britain: children in weird little Victorian outfits, creepy dolls, the queen of England, and sadness. I’ve never been to Britain, but I’m sure these are the touchmarks. It’s a whimsical children’s story about how wishing is bad that ends with one of the main characters burning to death. It’s Tottie: The Story Of A Dolls’ House.
I’ve never liked the children’s stories where toys come alive whenever children aren’t playing with them and have their own rich internal lives. Not all children play with their toys the same way. Some of us hung out with our Grandpa a lot as a little girl, watched a lot of westerns, and liked to play hang the cattle rustlers with Barbies. Toys shouldn’t be alive. It’s immediately a creepy concept, is the point.
Tottie: The Story Of A Doll’s House stars a family of four dolls owned by two girls named Emily and Charlotte. Emily and Charlotte are only shown in still photographs, and their thoughts and actions are spelled out by a narrator. The dolls all have their own voices; horrific noises recorded directly into a tin can. The narrator is also the director, Oliver Postgate, who directed many classic British children’s shows such as Bagpuss, Pingwings, and Pogel’s Wood, not a single one of which I made up, not even Bagpuss!
Is The Complete Bagpuss something you order for your best friend’s bachelor party? Or is it what I would call a woman who dinged my car in a parking lot and drove off without leaving a note? I.E., “What a total and Complete Bagpuss.” Sorry, I’m getting way off-topic. Let me introduce you to the Complete Bagpusses that inhabit the world of Tottie: The Story Of A Dolls’ House.
Mr. Plantaganet has PTSD from previously being owned by boys who drew a dumb little mustache on him and let a dog chew his foot off. Tottie is the lead of the show, a 100-year-old farthing doll that used to belong to Charlotte and Emily’s grandma. Mrs. Plantaganet, AKA Bridie, is at first a whimsical and later tragic character straight from a Dickens novel. Apple is a kid who can’t be posed easily, so he sort of rolls around most of the time, and Darner is the family… we’ll call it a “dog.” They live in a shoebox and make the vital mistake of wishing for a real dollhouse. They’ll soon learn the lesson that nothing good should ever happen to you, specifically British children.
Tottie used to live in a beautiful dollhouse that belonged to Charlotte and Emily’s grandma, and it was a perfect place to live, except that she had to share it with another doll named Marchpane, who was, please excuse my language, a Complete Bagpuss. Is this mention of Marchpane foreshadowing? Who knows. She describes the dollhouse to the other dolls, and they all wish to live in it; unfortunately, one day, the dollhouse is sent to Emily and Charlotte, but time has not been kind to it. It’s more of a doll trap house at this point. Or what a Chicago real estate agent would call a “quaint fixer-upper.”
So now the dolls have to wish for the house to be less yucky, which they do, and of course, the children comply with the doll’s wishes, fixing everything up and making it much nicer. For a brief time, everyone is happy. Tottie gives everyone a tour of the fixed-up house and points out things like a pink room that Bridie falls in love with and a lamp with a real birthday candle in it that they must never go near, especially Birdie because she’s made of celluloid and will burn up in an instant. Could this be foreshadowing? Haha, we’ll see!
So now the house is nice, except for the sofa and chairs, which were too wrecked for the girls to fix, so the dolls have to wish for them to be nicer as well. However, the girls don’t have enough money for new furniture. That’s why all of their dolls look so crappy. So they decided to lend Tottie out to an antique doll exhibit for a dollar, which will give them enough money to upgrade the furniture. Guess who Tottie runs into at the doll museum: that Complete Bagpuss, Marchpane.
Sorry, none of those dolls are Marchpane. I just thought you might like to see some of the other dolls at the doll museum upon which the camera lingers. This is the beautiful and vain antique doll Marchpane. She’s marginally less terrifying:
Marchpane is pretty intense. She hates children and being played with. She just wants to be looked at and admired. She tells all of the other dolls that Tottie ain’t shit because she’s made out of wood and can’t even open and close her eyes like Marchpane. When Tottie talks about the dollhouse, Marchpane tells everyone that it’s actually her dollhouse, not Tottie’s. Anyway, Queen Elizabeth visits the exhibit and wants to buy Tottie, which shuts Marchpane up real fast, and luckily, Tottie isn’t for sale.
Eventually, Tottie returns home to the dollhouse. They get new furniture, and everything is fine. Tottie has learned her lesson that wishing brings mean little dolls into her life, and she doesn’t wish anymore, haha, you fools. Of course, she makes more cursed wishes. It’s almost Christmas, and she wishes for a parasol for Birdie, a marble for Apple, and a job for Mr. Plantaganet so he can go to work every day like Charlotte and Emily’s father. She actually dreams of labor.
These girls once again give the dolls everything they wish for, including making a tiny post office for Mr. Plantaganet to work at, but in return, the universe sends horrible consequences. Once again, the form of Marchpane, who is gifted to the girls for Christmas. Marchpane is immediately like, “You’re all my servants now.” Mr. Plantaganet is the butler, Bridie is the housekeeper, Tottie is the cook, and Apple is her son. They all object, but Marchpane says, “I can wish that too. You’ll see.”
The girls redesign the whole house by Marchpane’s request, giving her the pink room Birdie loved and rearranging the family to be Marchpane’s servants. This drives Birdie insane. She can’t remember that Apple isn’t her son anymore and that the pink room isn’t hers. She keeps trying to go into the living room with Marchpane and Apple, where she isn’t allowed. Then, one day, Charlotte and Emily decide to light that dangerous birthday candle lamp, and one of the main characters of this beloved children’s show is completely immolated.
Imagine being the director of this and telling the child actors, “Ok, now your doll that was driven to madness by your cruel playtime has just burned to death. Perfect! That’s the perfect face! Don’t stop making that face! Look at the smoking clothing crater that was once your beloved doll!”
The girls suddenly decide they don’t like Marchpane after seeing her calmly watch Birdie burn to death. They donate her back to the museum where she was previously on display. The narrator points out that this is what Marchpane wanted all along, so she gets a happily ever after. The end! Sorry, I think a particularly strong doll made a wish for me to end my article with Marchpane’s happily ever after. Marchpane is still out there, and I hate that. She makes Annabelle look like Malibu Barbie.
Back at the dollhouse, life goes on. Mr. Plantaganet and Tottie have a conversation about Birdie to wrap things up. “Wasn’t she beautiful in the flame, like a firework?” Mr. Plantaganet says. WEIRD! Don’t tell children burning to death is cool. They’ll do anything to look cool. Mr Plantaganet is going to start a TikTok challenge and end millions of creepy little British children’s lives!
The dolls all decide that shit happens, and Birdie would want them to be happy, so they’re all just going to be happy in their dollhouse now that they have everything they want. So, to recap, Birdie, a perfectly nice little character, burns to death (but looks good doing it), and her family immediately moves on. Marchpane, I hate to talk about women this way, but a complete and utter Bagpuss, lives her dream life after doing nothing but bringing misery to all around her. So the lesson is to be mean and force everyone around you into servitude, and your life will rule. Very British!
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SEEED, who loves when dolls move around on their own and thinks it is totally normal and fine.
