They say you meet the nicest people on a Honda…and there are few bikes as nice (or as gosh-darn cute) as the Honda Monkey. Photos by Kevin Wing.
We normally lead off our bike reviews with an action-packed image, dramatically leaned over, the rider a masked superhero in flight. Somehow that didn’t feel right for the Honda Monkey, however, so we chose one more in alignment with its personality and mission.
After all, one of the hashtags provided by Honda for the press launch on Catalina Island (which it had dubbed the “Isle of Monkey”) was #POWERofNICE. And come on, it’s the Monkey. As in “more fun than a barrel of?.”
A little backstory on the Monkey bike before we dive into the particulars: back in 1961, an amusement park in the Tokyo suburbs called Tama Tech debuted a ride to promote the “joys of driving,” using little bikes dubbed the Z100 that used Honda?s 50cc Super Cub engine. Riders at Tama Tech rip around on the little Z100 Hondas.
The ride was so popular that Honda introduced a CZ100 production bike in Europe and Asia in 1963, with an off-road-only Z50A introduced in the U.S. in 1968. Honda sold 50,000 Z50As that first year, and a legend was born.
An entire generation learned to ride on the little Z50 (which was nicknamed the monkey bike due to how riders looked on the thing), and today?s young ‘uns can still get their first taste of two-wheeled delight on the CRF50 dirt bike.
This Honda ad from 1970 shows a...