Let me preface this by saying I don’t come at this as an actual fan of the show so much as someone who was a fan of the commercials. It aired in a time slot I wasn’t able to watch except to catch the rare snippet when I was sick and mostly cordoned off at daycare. I got Street Sharks and Stone Protectors instead. My local Fox Kids station happened to be one that cut a custom voiceover into its promos to state the day and time stuff aired, because the station controlled the schedule and some did that to the generic reels for the benefit of their viewers, but that just meant I sort of had to accept it was not to be.

But honestly what are you doing as an adult if you don’t buy crap you couldn’t get in childhood? I got the figures months ago and the bikes just arrived, so why not tell you how they are?

The figures

To be clear, only the primary trio is currently available. No villains, no Charlie, no minor characters. And they’re not the same 6" scale as the vintage toys. These are ¹⁄₁₀ scale figures.

The good

The best thing I was afraid would suck is that despite the promo material, all of them are actually to proper scale, which means the trio are stair-stepped rather than a uniform height. None of them are "short" with Vinnie being 6’1", but Throttle and Modo are respectively 6’4" and 6’9" officially. Modo as a figure is a very satisfying 8" or so.

The paint is "shelf appeal" level without being "collector" level. Especial care was taken on the faces and heads, with Throttle having painted eyes behind his shades when they could have just done his shades like they did for his helmet head. The shades are actually removable on the two exposed heads, but you do want to be careful, as they’re hard plastic and all their flexibility comes from having thin arms. The left side (his right) is the load bearing part you’ll actually need to free. The helmets have a clear colored plastic window in front of a fully painted face, but this window is not intended to be removed, so that "cheat" is perfectly reasonable when it would have been acceptable on the normal heads. Paint elsewhere is done well enough, with a little bit of red on one of their boots, a little brown where the green didn’t totally cover the sides of a belt pouch, a little sloppiness on a holstered gun that’s purely decorative rather than a separate piece, but nothing you actually care about. Hands get adequate treatment despite the paint going on some of the fingers a bit thin, but again, nothing too horrible. These are the sorts of acceptable errors that make the price as low as it is and frankly I have had far worse on far much more expensive.

Each Mouse comes with a standard head, a smiling head, and a riding helmet head, because "safety first" somehow doesn’t apply to the gnarly road rash you’d get from wearing so little on your chest or arms. Each has a pair of standard "holding" hands on by default and comes packed with a pair of closed fists and a pair of naturally open hands. Each has an identical Blaster gun and some form of larger cannon-like accessory, only one of which is actually a launcher and another of which is a claw, with a crowbar added in to compensate. For some reason the crowbar has a gun-like handle like it’s also supposed to be a rifle? All three also come with a hot dog. Specifically a lovingly rendered hot dog in a bun, a premium curved red butcher’s frankfurter with the tips of the casing left on from the pinch of the link in its purest form, hold the condiments. I know just enough about the show to feel like there is no heterosexual reason for that.

Articulation is quite good with double elbows and knees; ball joints at the head, tail, wrists, ankles, shoulders, and hips; and their torsos also have a limited ball joint in the middle for a modest bend. They have a twist at the shoulder and hip, plus a waist twist. Their boots are stompy enough to let them stand stable. The only bits that are really loose are on Modo’s torso in particular and to a lesser extent the others, but this is not load-bearing and while it doesn’t necessarily "hold," it doesn’t "flop," either.

The most charming thing is that they come crammed in a box that looks like it knows how to compete for space on a shelf. So many things releasing these days have no sense of efficiency whatsoever, demanding three times the figures’ widths with everything on display, where here all the extra hands and most of their other accessory bits are behind cardboard rather than plastic window. None of them have a plastic loop to go on a hook, but it just feels like that means they demand to be stood up on a shelf, packed shoulder-to-shoulder with their kin for all the little kiddies to beg for. I never thought I’d get nostalgic about packaging, but here we are. Nacelle nailed it.

These figures are lovingly presented to you as an adult fan in a way that hits all the ways your childhood memories glossed over the imperfections perfectly. That’s something that cannot be cynically distilled, only creatively put forward to what is ultimately a cynical pencil-pusher for approval. Which is to say even though it cannot come from the same business sense as existed 30 years ago, it arrives at the same destination, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The bad

The first I tried to twist Vinnie’s left arm to pose him, it twisted right off. Looking at the way it connects, the double elbow joint is rather ingeniously attached to the peg that goes into the shoulder, but there seems to have been a production issue in that there is no visible ball or edge that should hold it in, so it’s kind of just stuck in there via friction, or maybe it just wasn’t jammed in well enough by the machinery, because testing it now after having worked it as together as I could previously, it seems to be holding. That seems to be the only arm with this issue, but the problem of it being able to all but fall off really made me nervous. The twist is pretty hard as soft plastic on soft plastic, or maybe hard rubber on hard rubber, I honestly have no idea where one begins and ends, but there’s not a whole lot of give to it, so I’m going with soft plastic. Twisting it a bit more seems to have loosened it up a bit to where it feels workable and I’ll probably have to do that for the others, because it was otherwise ridiculously stiff.

There are also proportional issues in that one leg is legitimately slightly longer than the other on these things, and at least one leg bows forward, and that kind of forces you to pose them as anything but stock straight.

The tails are also just a ball joint stuck in the butt and have limited range before they pop right out of the hard plastic.

Which is to say there is just so much potential to lose bits and pieces of these things if you’re not careful. I have never seen any toy labeled ages 14+, but I kind of get why these are.

Also Throttle’s Sprocket Launcher made me SUPER nervous about actually trying it because I was so afraid I’d break it. Unlike basically anything else in these sets, it’s straight-up hard resin, with silver paint that’s absolutely going to scratch, rub off, and otherwise be brutally fragile in anything but a shelf environment. I did eventually carefully get it to fire, after freeing up where the paint had adhered to itself, and decided that once was enough.

The necks are actually kind of short to the point Throttle is sneakily packaged with his head floating off the post to make it look a bit more right. I also kind of just don’t like how the necks are craned forward, like they were built specifically to look good on the bikes without much regard to how they looked standing. Posing them standing made me have to toy with the body lean to fake anything remotely straight and it was legit easier to have them bent forward looking like they were watching something interesting in the distance.

The neutral

Throttle’s bandana is part of his vest, while Vinnie’s is separate from his bandoleers and really has no way of sitting flat. The heads pop off very easily, but you kind of want that since they have multiple. The hands in comparison are an absolute bear to swap, maybe because they’re smaller.

As for the eyes, it’s very strange, actually, because cartoons being cartoons, there was variation depending on who was drawing them that scene. Modo could be as tall as 7’0" by some estimates, but the really weird thing is sometimes they’d give his eye this sort of fang-shaped pupil in close-up shots, which is basically what they did here by giving him a very clear downward-pointing pennant. In contrast, the others were drawn both with and without pupils depending on the shot, so Vinnie gets these relatively small red irises that don’t quite look right without a black outline, while Throttle gets pinprick pupils, which, well, I don’t know so much about pinpricks, because everything I’ve seen depicts the pupils as comfortably large. Pinprick pupils always give me sympathy pains to look at because as someone who wears glasses, I’ve probably experienced them more than most. Anyway, none of this is terible, just sort of… weird. Like they decided to look at the show for how things were supposed to look and then rather than choose to represent them consistently, unifying on what’s honestly the standard round pupil style, they decided to depict all the exceptions.

Overall

Honestly, for shelf appeal, they are a steal at under $40 each. These are not figures you bash together and throw in a toy box as much as they capture that.

The bikes

The thing that makes the Biker Mice interesting, of course, is their rides, or else they would just be the Pedestrian Mice from Mars or maybe the Public Transportation Riding Mice from Mars, which doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

The neutral

The bikes, hilariously, are each $11 more expensive than their riders, and even more hilariously each come with an auxiliary hot dog.

I seriously have no idea why these toys seem so obsessed with hot dogs, because I don’t recall Street Sharks being obsessed with hamburgers or Stone Protectors being obsessed with kebabs or frankly anything else, which is kind of weird considering half their stuff was made out of grills. I mean the Street Sharks ate hamburgers (and hot dogs for that matter) because that was just teen food, but the joke was pizza was the only thing they didn’t eat, because nothing says "we’re not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" better than consuming everything but pizza. If the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ love for pizza and only pizza as a specific food really needed direct ripping off, hot dogs aren’t even the most unique option, with Sonic having done chili dogs starting the same season. I have no idea why they felt the need to sweeten the motorcycle deal with yet another hot dog. Seriously, they specifically wear helmets while they’re riding; they have no way of eating them. They shouldn’t be double-fisting hot dogs on the road even if they did. How many hot dogs do these guys eat?

I can kind of give them a pass on the price since what you’re really paying for is not so much "more plastic" as it is "maybe twice as much plastic, one or more LEDs, some hearing aid batteries, quite a bit of actual rubber, maybe even some pretty strong magnets, and larger packaging." If the Mice could be crammed on a shelf standing shoulder-to-shoulder, the bikes would be the sort of thing you’d only have room for a few rows of if you weren’t tipping them up for display. They take up space and that will always come at a premium.

The good

As for the bikes themselves, each comes with a small handful of accessories each, with Vinnie’s Radical Rocket Sled having a magnet on the back for the laser cannon to attach to (I say this specifically because I had to look it up because these things ship with no instructions and I spent probably 15 minutes trying to rub the gun against every other surface trying to find the attachment point, and the promo material is not helpful showing it balanced in the crook of the rear-view mirror). Modo’s Mondo Chopper has a swap-out headlight plate with and without guns; Throttle’s Martian Monster Bike comes with some assembly required to attach its own laser cannon and rockets using clips. All three come with a rubber dust cloud that doubles as a stand.

The bikes come with batteries installed for the LEDs each have. The Rocket Sled lights up its headlight and the console, possibly on a single LED, possibly on more, as there is absolutely room for that in its generous front end. The Chopper only has the headlight and it’s actually kind of disappointing, but the paint on the console is pretty good, so it could be a lot worse, and in its defense, it does have the swappable lens to worry about and a swivel to the front that the Rocket Sled does not have, so maybe there was a compromise. Throttle’s Monster Bike is the only one that would actually be road legal with a tail light that also lights up, which is a nice touch given his front wheel also has a swivel to worry about, but the tail light is static, so that might just have been safer. The button to turn the light on and off is easy enough to find on each, yet tasteful, hiding itself in the padding or some obvious choice of things motorcycles have sticking out of them anyway, each not too far from the handlebars.

The bikes all have rubber wheels without treads and it makes for a solid grip in the dust cloud stand. They label it as a "Martian" dust cloud, but they’re not actually all that orange in real life despite what the promo shots show. They’re actually quite a natural dirty brown, uniform in that, but have a very nice irregular grit to the color as if they were brushed rather than sprayed. The base rubber is a slightly milky clear whitish color that makes for good dust even if it hadn’t been painted brown over it. Despite them not being very wide, they make for a solid base to hold up each bike. There’s no threat of tipping whatsoever.

Each bike also comes with a pair of exhaust flames that may look identical at first, but actually each only plug flush into one bike’s exhaust shape. These are a clear base airbrushed a solid orange and I’m really not sure why they didn’t just use orange plastic to begin with and skip the paint, but they look fine.

The Rocket Sled also has the unique benefit of a rubber accordion shock for the back wheel and this actually gives a very satisfying squish to the give that doing it with plastic and a spring or rubber band wouldn’t. It feels like a shock, not just a lever. It also has articulated controls that twist and pull out, seemingly to compensate not having a turn to work with.

There are also black brake cables on the others in something I’ll call hard rubber that I was terrified were just a part of the plastic, but the glue on them is actually less obvious than the glue for Throttle’s mirrors.

The bad

There are a lot of more fragile bits that will absolutely break in anything approaching "play" that made me nervous. Getting Modo and Throttle to hold the handlebars had to be carefully done by working the bulbous ends past their thumbs and that’s absolutely going to cause paint wear on both. One of the handlebars had scratches through the black paint as some sort of production error. Or maybe it contracted and cracked somehow.

The one real gripe I do have is that the mirrors aren’t mirrors and Throttle’s aren’t even painted, just left the same gray as the rest of the plastic. Vinnie’s one mirror has white paint on it. Like, come on, I know there are zero stickers on literally any of this and that’s mostly to their benefit, but you couldn’t have spared two triangles and a circle of Mylar™ and a bit of adhesive to actually make them reflective? Or even just a bit of silver paint? Like I know the "gray" is supposed to be metal, but it just feels like the one thing they should have done and didn’t if these were going to be premium. Because they are absolutely premium. They have a premium price and a premium build and a premium shelf footprint; they are premium. That’s really the only detail that makes them feel cheap. And maybe it’s petty, but I actually feel pretty strongly about it.

Overall

I don’t think you actually need the bikes, but they do feel like taking it to the next level. Invest in a Mouse first and if you like it, maybe get the others, and then only really get any of the bikes if you feel committed. Being very honest, I got the bikes because it increased my ability to move the trio off a shelf I borrowed from Goseiger stuff to put them on a dresser that has a decorative rug on it that I didn’t intend to muck with as part of my mom’s remaining stuff in the room. I ended up grabbing some plastic drawers from the garage as part of trying to organize stuff a bit and they’re on top of that, but I don’t know that I’ll necessarily leave them there long-term. It’s nice for now because everything is new, but I want to keep my options a bit more open and the bikes do that.

Final word

I feel like for what everything is, it’s shockingly affordable, but by God does it never feel that way when you’re shelling out ~$150 for three motorcycles after shelling out ~$100 for three figures. The figures feel like they justify their price because they compare well to their own kind, but the bikes have less to compare to and it feels kind of ridiculous emotionally that they should be so expensive. Logically, I understand completely, but emotionally, they’re "just" a vehicle and have no right to be that price. I guess your mileage may vary, because having them in hand answers a lot of questions you might have having them in cart. The bikes easily justify their price point when materials are considered, because ultimately none of these things take more than pennies to fabricate and assemble, but for "just bikes" they knew what they were doing, pricing them only 30% over the figures despite using well over twice the materials, and probably triple the material costs, never mind shipping inefficiencies.

Do I regret getting them? No. But, like, don’t rush out, either. If you’re not a fan, they aren’t going to magically make you one or anything. What they are, though, is very aesthetic, which I suppose is the only form of "fandom" I personally have. It’s a weird sort of nostalgia where I saw the same promo over and over again, but never actually got to partake. And, well, after Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers came in like a wrecking ball, that was basically the only thing anyone cared about anymore, so it was easy to forget about them until later. Which is kind of weird, really, because ThunderCats was also sort of an anime, a Japanese/American fusion; just not one initiated in Japan and nobody really realized it yet, but it kind of walked so Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles could run and kick off the "animals with attitude" genre that graced our TVs for so long in both shows and games.

As far as any of that goes, Biker Mice from Mars ended up less forgotten than most, getting the fugly 2006 reboot and quite frankly now these toys and some comics with Nacelle owning the rights and actually trying to do something with them. And it’s clear Nacelle understands the assignment. I guess the biggest irony is that Nacelle doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page because it’s basically one guy who made a career out of nostalgia and the actual owner of the property is freaking Marvel, yet Nacelle gets to do a "Nacelle-verse" of whatever rights it’s cobbled together instead of this worming its way into the MCU, Ryan Reynolds is doing a reboot series with his own production company, and Marvel has been suspiciously quiet on it, like it’s just like "yeah, Ryan, just remember The Other Mouse knows where you live." Which I guess is just kind of hilarious in its own right.

I guess to sum it up, it’s a good time to be a fan, and these are relatively affordable shelf candy for that purpose.