If Ralph the mouse can ride a motorcycle, I can too!

It was all downhill from there.

While I was still in elementary school, my parents bought my teenaged older brother a motorcycle, then a bigger one and yet another, even bigger one, so that he was tooling around Los Alamos, N.M., on his Harley-Davidson 900 Sportster during his senior year in high school.

I had inherited a few sweat shirts and a baseball mitt from my older brother, so I looked forward to inheriting his motorcycle, too.

Around the time of my brother's Sportster glory, however, my mom inexplicably got the idea to ban motorcycles from the family (with my brother's bike grandfathered in). All my grand motorcycle dreams, first conjured by Cleary's biker mouse, were squashed.

Only this week, during the 69th annual Bike Week here in Daytona Beach, did I finally figure out why my mom turned anti-bike: pop culture.

As the entertainment writer here at The News-Journal, I decided to mark this Bike Week by picking my list of the 10 greatest biker moments in pop culture, whether on film, in music, in novels, etc.

And so I began churning over possible nominees. It got ugly -- quick.

When it comes to motorcyclists portrayed in pop culture, the basic formula is: Bikers = hooligans/squared X rebel foolhardiness divided by disaster = Death.

Yeah, I know. That bikers have a bad rep in movies and TV shows and other pop-culti stuff isn't a news flash. But, in concocting my list, I was struck by the amount of downer stuff.

The first biker moment that popped into my mind: Altamont.

Sorry about that, bikers. As a journalist, I have to report the truth. If a psychiatrist plays word association with me and tosses out the word "biker," I will reply with "Altamont," that infamous, chaotic, violence-plagued 1969 concert headlined by the Rolling Stones.

Altamont forever became connected to biker lore when an 18-year-old man, brandishing a pistol near the stage and later determined to be high on meth, was stabbed to death by a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang.

The killing was captured in the documentary film "Gimme Shelter," released a year later. (A still from the movie is shown above.) 

Also in 1969, my mom and dad loaded up my two brothers and me in the station wagon and we went to see "Easy Rider" at a drive-in in Albuquerque.

My 11-year-old mind was blissfully digging on these hippie biker dudes -- Capt. America, cool! -- until (spoiler alert!) George got whacked (which was a bit of a bummer, kind of like Bambi's mom), and then (mega-spoiler alert!) -- BOOM!

Big bummer.

My family also had seen daredevil Evel Knievel perform at a raceway in Albuquerque in summer 1968. Unfortunately, Evel had broken a leg during a jump a few weeks before his appearance, so all he did was pop a few wheelies around the track.

But Evel's broken leg, coupled with his notorious, horrific crash at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas just six months earlier, must have given my mom major willies.

And my mom's psyche also was pounded by Altamont, "Easy Rider," Marlon Brando's "The Wild One" from the 1950s and Roger Corman's "The Wild Angels" from 1966 (with a soundtrack album that spent a lot of time on the stereo we brothers shared). Throw in any number of outlaw biker B-movies from the 1960s, Steppenwolf's brain-bruising, proto-metal biker anthem "Born to be Wild" (quite scary at the time), the goofy simpleton Eric Von Zipper from those Frankie Avalon beach flicks, and the Zen-infested title character of the short-lived 1969 TV series "Then Came Bronson" (who was a good guy, but he seemed awfully lonely).

No wonder my mom decided to outlaw motorcycles and their insidious, Svengali-like influence.

And now I'm wondering if my mom, the better to protect my young mind and heart, ripped out the concluding pages of "The Mouse and the Motorcycle."

Given the dire fate of Capt. America and other bikers, I wonder if Ralph the mouse got his head blown off as he was gleefully riding across America in search of himself. In pop culture, that just seems to be the biker way.

Rick de Yampert is The Daytona Beach News-Journal's entertainment writer. He can be reached at rick.deyampert@news-jrnl.com