It seems 2024 will be the year that every ’90s toy line that hoped to capitalize on the Ninja Turtle craze comes back. Street Sharks! Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa! And of course, Biker Mice From Mars. (Toxic Crusaders? Never entirely went away, thanks to being based on Troma films’ mascot.)
With a relaunched comic and an upcoming animated series produced by the likes of Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds, the Biker Mice look likely to get a higher profile than they ever had before. Will they also be the big breakout toy hit that Nacelle‘s been looking for? Let’s take a look.
Squeaky Clean
The design of the Biker Mice is an odd aesthetic, with kiddie-cartoon style heads that would fit with the likes of Mighty Mouse and Danger Mouse, but biker bodies more appropriate to a line like C.O.P.S. and Crooks. It’s a little incongruent, and something that takes getting used to.
Nacelle’s looking to create a shared universe with all their revived toy lines, but it’s not clear they’re necessarily thinking about scaling all the different types of figures together. If a Sectaur is meant to represent a human height, these Mice are taller; if the Mice are, then Sectaurs are short. We’ll see in the final cartoon, but evidently each individual toy line is less concerned with matching the others than in being internally consistent.
It’s notable that the three hero mice who comprise wave one are themselves different sizes, making it clear there’s no simple mold reuse happening here. Vinnie is the smallest one, Throttle the leader is medium, and cyborg Modo is the big guy. Modo is also the only one of the three who doesn’t reproduce his vintage action feature, but it’s frankly cool that any of them do.
It’s all in the weapons: Throttle has a working disc launcher with tarnished discs that look like hubcaps. Vinnie has a lever-operated clamp. Modo used to have a spring-loaded gun, but here it’s just a solid piece. Spring-powered projectiles probably subject figures to more safety testing, but Nacelle surely could have found a way to do a finger-flick or pressure point missile instead.
Plastic and Bludd
Like the vintage G.I. Joe Major Bludd, his gimmick, as such, is less articulation in his robot arm — a single hinge instead of a double. At least he’s the biggest, so you get more bulk for the buck. All three come with more extra bits than they did back in the day, and as such are packed in boxes rather than blister cards.
The original figures came with removable helmets that rather notoriously broke off the Mice’s antennae after a while. Nacelle has simply made swappable helmeted heads, with Vinnie’s visor a unique cool blue. Each Mouse also includes serious and happier heads, as well as multiple swap-out hands, which, honestly, they really don’t need. Vinnie gets his crowbar bonus weapon, and all three come with blasters and their favorite hot dogs, because with the Turtles loving pizza, and Popeye’s pal Wimpy paying Tuesday for hamburgers today, somebody had to claim the other angle of the fast food pyramid real quick.
Throttle’s sunglasses are removable on all but the helmeted head. Like his teammates, he has red eyes underneath. [Note: bikes are not available yet for these figures, but they are coming. The bike used in these shots is a LEGO Technic Batcycle from The Batman, scaled slightly larger.]
Self-Identifying
Throttle also has an arm tattoo described as a “Biker Mice From Mars” tattoo, which seems weird, like if I were to get a “Writer Human From Earth” logo. To each their own.
The heads and ball-jointed tails pop off easily — these figures should play well with kids, so long as they’re forewarned they’ll be popping them back on a lot. With ball joints at the shoulders and hips, and double-jointed knees and elbows (except Modo’s robot arm), they hold a lot of poses, and feel extremely playable. If the aesthetic works for you, they’re almost everything they need to be (Modo’s gun should shoot, dagnabbit)
Base price for these figures is $35.99, which is high by normal 7-inch figure standards, but not out of bounds for limited figures with individual sculpts. (My guess is the extra hands are there to add perceived value, since they’d be fine with just the accessory-holding pair.) Compared to mass retail, they’re high; compared to similar male order 7-inch figures, not so much. The Nacelle Sectaurs cost more, at $39.99, and come with less stuff.
See How They Run
It’s arguably tough to judge Biker Mice without their bikes, which look to be far more deluxe than in the original line. But that’s what we must do so far, and to that end, it’s nice to see gimmicks returning in nostalgia/collector figures, even as simple as “push lever, clamp goes shut.” By the ’90s, too many toy companies got lazy and just put a spring-loaded weapon with everything — that, rather than the concept of play features, became the problem.
I admit to a certain personal bias against the aesthetic of the Biker Mice, in that I don’t care for the art style, but it’s impossible to hold that against the toys, which are fun to fiddle around with and pose. When you can have figures take on wrestling toys hold for hold, the articulation is good. I might not have bought these for myself — Nacelle sent them for review — but I’d definitely consider buying them as gifts. And unlike the Sectaurs, they are indisputably an improvement over their predecessors.
Except Modo’s dang gun!
Check out more photos below to see all the poses they’ll do.
