It might be black with red and yellow flames, or pink with white sidewalls and streamers, or purple with a picture of the Pink Panther. The seat is wide, the handlebars high, the tires chubby and the ride like bouncing butter.

It’s cruise control, baby, where fashion meets fitness meets the 1950s, and the city streets are everybody’s runway.

This is the bike for the anti-cyclist, the person who gets exhausted just watching the Tour de France on TV: coaster brakes and sheer comfort. Spandex strictly forbidden.

“It’s kind of like riding your living room,” says Reeves Macdonald of Sports Garage, a Boulder, Colo., shop that’s a mecca for the back-to-the-future bikes known as cruisers.

“Nice and smooth, very comfortable, relaxed,” Macdonald says of the bikes. “They steer like elephants, so you can just kind of go straight and enjoy.”

This is the bike I rode when I was a kid, the red one with the balloon tires handed down from my older brother. I loved it desperately, but like most first loves, I figured it was gone forever.

Electra Bicycle Co. is a success story based in Carlsbad, Calif. The company was built on the idea that the non-biker would succumb to the call of the cruiser — a friendly, comfy, non-threatening kind of machine designed specifically for fun, but with the utmost panache.

“Some of the bikes out there are a fabulous accessory,” says Macdonald, whose store carries Electra, Nirve and Breezer cruisers. “They have pink flames and bells and tassels and chopper handlebars. You can go from something conservative and classic to looking like a … Hell’s Angel without the engine.”

Germans Benno Baenziger and partner Jeano Erforth started Electra more than a decade ago, infusing their love of all things retro-American with a passion for fashion and excruciating attention to detail. It has been a winning combination.

The front wheel of the Bianchi Milano in the color celeste.

“Their sales are through the roof,” Electra spokeswoman Barbara Mizuno says.

Independent bike dealers are doing the same thing in Denver that they’re doing in Los Angeles: lining up cruisers on the sidewalk outside their stores to reel in those heretofore reluctant buyers.

Almost all the bikes the Sports Garage puts out front are cruisers.

“These bikes have a lot of sex appeal to a whole variety of people,” Macdonald says. “When I put out a cruiser with chopper handlebars and an outrageous paint job — like green with yellow flames — everyone wants to come in and try it out.”

Why the big crush on cruisers? Mizuno compares the bike with the Vespa and the Mini-Cooper, two other vehicles with the adorable factor built right in.

The coaster brake is part of the pedal in the Bianchi Milano

“Well over 50 percent of our buyers are women,” Mizuno says. “Women just instantly buy them because they’re so cute. Benno takes the best of fashion and does a really good job with it.”

Electra’s cruisers have names like “Rat Fink” and “Betty” and come in three flavors: a Classic; the Stream Ride, four inches longer than the Classic with a hot-rod attitude; and the Essential, a modernized, lightweight version. They’re cheap enough to be an impulse buy, averaging around $300.

Electra’s “Townie” line combines the best of retro and recumbent, and boasts “flat-foot technology.” That means when you sit on it, you can put your feet on the ground — none of that tippy-toe stuff.

Whoa. My kinda bike.

The cruiser is even a teenage girl’s kind of bike, which illustrates the depth of its allure. My 15-year-old daughter, whose idea of exercise is flipping the pages of a Stephen King novel, recently bought a beach cruiser off the Internet. It cost less than $200, including shipping, and it is so ultra-cool that her 11-year-old brother covets it. He doesn’t even care that it’s pearlescent pink.

Now that’s appeal.