Captain Underpants
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The Captain Underpants series, by Dav Pilkey, is a series of US children's books about two 4th graders, George and Harold, and their mean old principal Mr. Krupp.
In their spare time, George and Harold write comic books about a superhero they made up which they called Captain Underpants, hence the name. This character is named after his clothing habit of wearing only a red cape with black polka-dots and a pair of white briefs. Their cartoon character is unexpectedly brought to life when George and Harold jokingly hypnotize Mr. Krupp to act like Captain Underpants. To their consternation, from then on whenever somebody snaps their fingers Mr. Krupp transforms into Captain Underpants, and then turns back if water is poured over his head.
Series titles
- The Adventures of Captain Underpants
- Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets
- Captain Underpants and the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assualt of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds)
- Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants
- The Captain Underpants Extra-Crunchy Book o' Fun
- Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman
- The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby
- The All-New Extra Crunchy Book o' Fun 2
- Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Part 1: The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets
- Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Part 2: The Revenge of the Ridiculous Robo-Boogers
- Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People, Part 1: The Clash of the Colossal Kung-Fu Monkeys from Beyond Infinity (not released as of 2005)
- Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People Part 2: The Terrifying Return of Tippy Tinkletrousers (not released as of 2005)
These books, although "potty-mouthed", are considered very clever and funny by their target audience, and even some of their parents. The book often makes references to things from the 1970s. Pilkey also wrote and illustrated a book called The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby, which takes the form of a comic book drawn and written by George and Harold.
Because they use "potty humor" and are claimed to encourage disobedience to authority, the Captain Underpants books were reported to be among the ten most frequently challenged books by the American Library Association. Certain things have been included in the books (posters that advertise mindless conformity, school rules against using your imagination, an evil librarian that has banned all but one book from the school library) as a response to this.
Plot Summaries
The Adventures of Captain Underpants
The Captain Underpants series begins with the school troublemakers, George Beard and Harold Hutchins, playing a series of practical jokes that cause their school to lose a football game. Their principal, Mr. Krupp, gets so angry at them he imposes a set of draconian rules such as "No laughing or smiling", and requires them to spend every spare minute of their day, beginning at 6am, catering to his every whim. If they don't comply, Mr. Krupp will show a surveilllance video of George and Harold setting up the pranks that ruined the game to the football team.
So George and Harold buy a 3-D Hypno-Ring (receiving it after 6-8 weeks of back-stabbing labor) and hypnotize Mr. Krupp to make him give them the incriminating video. Then they start goofing around. They hypnotize him to act like Captain Underpants, who is the hero of their home-made comic books. To their distress, Mr. Krupp, as Captain Underpants, runs away to fight crime.
Captain Underpants confronts two bank robbers, and orders them to "Surrender! Or I will have to resort to Wedgie Power!" The bank robbers fall down in hysterics and are apprehended by the police. The police want to arrest Captain Underpants too, but George and Harold whisk him to safety on their skateboards.
Then the three witness two robots stealing a large crystal. Captain Underpants tries to stop them, and his cape gets caught on their van. Captain Underpants, with George and Harold clinging to him, is thus dragged to an old, abandoned warehouse.
There they meet the evil Dr. Diaper, who plans to use the crystal as part of his Laser-Matic 2000 to blow up the moon, destroying every major city on earth, so that he can take over the planet. George and Harold hide, but Captain Underpants is captured and tied up.
George uses a slingshot to toss a piece of fake dog poop between Dr. Diaper's feet. Dr. Diaper is terribly embarrassed, thinking that he has had an "accident". While he goes off to change his diaper, George and Harold beat up the robots and untie Captain Underpants. They pull the self-destruct lever on the Laser-Matic 2000.
Dr. Diaper, enraged at the destruction of the Laser-Matic 2000, his robots, and his plan to take over the world, aims his Diaper-Matic 2000 ray gun at George, Harold, and Captain Underpants.
Quickly, Captain Underpants shoots a pair of underwear at Dr. Diaper. The underwear covers Dr. Diaper's face. No longer able to defend himself, Dr. Diaper is taken to the police station.
George, Harold, and Captain Underpants return to Mr. Krupp's office. The boys try to figure out how to return Mr. Krupp to his normal self, but they've lost the instruction manual for the 3-D Hypno-Ring. In desperation, George tries dumping water on Mr. Krupp's head. It works, but from then on, whenever anyone snaps their fingers, Mr. Krupp turns into Captain Underpants.
Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets
George and Harold's school is going to hold its second annual Invention Convention. George and Harold remember how at the last Invention Convention, they pulled a super-glue prank on the whole school, glueing everyone to their seats. This year, however, because the winner(s) of the Invention Convention gets to be Principal for a day, they decide to take it seriously.
Unfortunately, Mr. Krupp wants to avoid a fiasco like last years and bans George and Harold from the Invention Convention, forcing them to stay in study hall all day. They decide to secretly sabotage everyone's inventions in revenge.
While sneaking in to sabotage the inventions, they run into Melvin, the school brainiac. Melvin is working late on his invention, the PATSY 2000, which is a photocopier that turns two dimensional objects into three dimensional objects. To demonstrate, he puts in a photo of a mouse and out comes a real mouse.
George and Harold assume Melvin put the real mouse in earlier, and he's just trying to fool them. They promise not to sabotage Melvin's invention as long as he doesn't tell about them sabotaging the other inventions.
Thanks to the sabotage, the Invention Convention is a disaster and everyone in the school gets covered in slimy goo. Melvin breaks his promise and tattles on George and Harold. Mr. Krupp uses this to put George and Harold in detention for the rest of the year, with the threat that they'll be suspended if they leave the detention room.
George and Harold quickly finish their detention work (writing lines on a chalkboard) thanks to a rod that holes several pieces of chalk, so several sentences get written at the same time. They then write a book called "Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets" in which Captain Underpants defeats several evil toilets and their leader, the Turbo Toilet 2000.
George and Harold sneak out to photocopy their comic book, but the teacher's lounge where the copy machine is occupied. They decide to use the photocopier that Melvin had, which should work because it's unsabotaged.
Unfortunately, Melvin's machine really does turn two-dimensional objects into three-dimensional objects, so they evil toilets come to life and attack everyone in the school. Thanks to one of the teachers snapping her fingers at a toilet, Mr. Krupp turns into Captain Underpants, who comes up with a plan to stop the toilets. George and Harold chase after him as Captain Underpants takes several pairs of underwear from unsuspecting clothes lines.
Once back at the school, George, Harold and Captain Underpants use the underwear as a sling shot to shoot food in the evil toilet's mouths. Since it is disgusting cafeteria food, the toilets throw up everything (the food, the underwear and the teachers) and die.
The Turbo Toilet 2000 bursts out of the school (he was turned to life like all the other toilets, but was previously unseen) and fights and defeats Captain Underpants by swallowing him. George and Harold sneak into the school and use Melvin's machine to make a super-powered robot who does whatever they say.
The robot defeats the Turbo Toilet 2000, fixes up the school so it's back to normal, and takes all the evidence to Uranus with the command to never return. In return for fixing the school, George and Harold's suspension is cancelled and they get to be principals for the day. As the principals, they hold an all-day carnival and put the teachers (and Melvin) in detention.
Captain Underpants and the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assualt of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds)
Three evil aliens, Zorx, Klax, and Jennifer, land on the school roof and plan to take over the Earth by disguising themselves as cafeteria workers and feeding the kids alien food to turn them into evil zombie nerds and then using the kids to take over the world.
Meanwhile, in science class, George and Harold learn about the effects of mixing baking soda and vinegar together (the two ingredients don't mix and make a slimy sticky liquid). They decide to play a prank on the cafeteria ladies by giving them a recipe that involves mixing baking soda and vinegar. The recipe is disguised as a cupcake recipe, with instructions to make a set of the cupcakes for Mr. Krupp's birthday.
The lunch ladies decide to surprise Mr. Krupp and make cupcakes for the entire school. So instead of mixing a small amount of baking soda and vinegar, they mix a large amount, the result being that the school gets covered in the slimy green mixture. The lunch ladies get mad at Mr. Krupp (because he can't punish George and Harold because there's no proof they did anything wrong) and quit.
Zork, Klax, and Jennifer, badly disguised as humans, come in and take the open lunch lady job. They feed Zombie Nerd Juice for lunch, so everyone in the school (except George, Harold and Mr. Krupp, who are eating lunch together instead of in the cafeteria, which is their punishment for their prank) becomes a zombie nerd. George and Harold learn of the spacemen's plans to feed evil growth juice to the zombie nerds to make them humongous and evil, so it's easier to conquer Earth. George and Harold steal the growth juice and try to get rid of it, but accidentally pouring it on a dandelion.
When the boys prove to Mr. Krupp that the lunch ladies are aliens, one of the aliens snaps his tentacle (a physical impossibility) at them, so Mr. Krupp becomes Captain Underpants. They fight the aliens, but are unable to defeat the zombie nerds, so they escape by going on the school roof and into the alien spaceship.
Inside they find some anti-zombie nerd juice, some destructive juice and some super-power juice. The aliens come in and lock them in a cell. George and Harold mix up the juices and signs on the ship so the aliens pour destructive juice into the fuel tank, which makes the spaceship explode.
George and Harold and Captain Underpants escape by jumping off of the spaceship, using Captain Underpants's cape as a parachute. They land near the gigantic evil dandelion they accidentally created. Captain Underpants is unable to defeat the dandelion, so they are forced to give him the super-power juice. Captain Underpants then easily defeats the dandelion.
Using the anti-zombie nerd juice, they turn everyone back to normal. Mr. Krupp is no longer normal, though, because he drank the super-power juice, so now whenever he becomes Captain Underpants, he can fly and use other superpowers, thus making it harder for George and Harold to keep tabs on him.
Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants
Professor Pippy P. Poopypants, a scientist from a country where everyone has a silly name, New Swissland makes two inventions: a shrinking machine, the Shrinky-Pig 2000 and an enlarging machine, the Goosy-Grow 4000. He goes to America so he can show these inventions to everyone and help the world by using his machines to shrink the world's garbage and increase the world's food supply.
Unfortunately, everyone laughs at Pippy's name, instead of taking him seriously. He is forced to take a job as a science teacher at George and Harold's school (their old science teacher quit due to their pranks). Pippy is convinced that the innocence and sweetness of children will let them pay attention to him, but they all laugh at his name instead.
Pippy manages to get the children interested in science by building a machine that allows gerbils to jog alongside their masters. This inspires George and Harold to make a comic book, which destroys Professoer Poppypants's credibilty with the students and drives him crazy.
Using his enlarging machine, he makes the gerbil machine as large as a tall building and then gets inside. He shrinks the school and holds them hostage. He then unveils his plan to force everyone in the world to change their names so everyone will have a silly name instead of a normal on. Anyone who disagrees will be shrunk.
George and Harold (now Fluffy Toiletnose and Cheeseball Wafflefanny) get Captain Underpants (Buttercup Chickenfanny) to steal Professor Poppypants's enlarging machine, but unfortunately he and the machine are shrunk in the process.
The two of them try to enlarge the school back to normal size, but get flicked off the school and end up in an abandoned alley. They enlarge Captain Underpants to the size of Professor Poppypants's gerbil machine. Captain Underpants then fights and defeats Professor Poppypants. The boys use the shrinking and enlarging machines to get the school and Captain Underpants back to normal size.
Professor Poppypants is hauled off to jail. On the advice of George and Harold, he changes his name so no one will make fun of it anymore. Sadly, he chooses his grandfather's name, Tippy Tinkletrousers, which the people at jail make fun of.
The moral of the story ("I think this is the first time one of our stories had a moral," notes George) is that it's not nice to make fun of people.
The Captain Underpants Super-Crunchy Book o' Fun
This is basically an activity book, exept at the end it has a comic (by George and Harold) about Captain Underpants saving the day from an gaint, evil, hairy toilet called Hairy Toilet.
Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman
George and Harold's mean teacher (Ms. Ribble) is planning on retiring at the end of the school year. She forces everyone to make happy retirement cards for her. The boys make a Captain Underpants versus Wedgie Woman comic book instead (in the book, Captain Underpants is stopped by some spray starch, which makes his underwear stiff and uncomfortable, and so he loses his powers until he gets some fabric softener). The boys are sent to Mr. Krupp's office. Once there, they say they're there to get Mr. Krupp to sign the happy retirement card (he writes "Signed, Mr. Krupp" in a blank card).
Later on, when Mr. Krupp learns about them changing letters on the sign, he puts them in detention. They defiantly say they won't give Ms. Ribble her card. Mr. Krupp steals the card and says he'll give it to her personally. The boys secretly smile at how effective their use of reverse psychology was.
Mr. Krupp gives Ms. Ribble the card, which reads "Your one hot mama! Will you marry me? Signed, Mr. Krupp". Ms. Ribble agrees and on Saturday, the wedding is held in the school auditorium. Mr. Krupp is too shocked by the whole wedding thing to admit the truth, that he doesn't want to marry her.
At the wedding, George and Harold have no tricks planned (for once). On the altar, just before they get married, Ms. Ribble breaks up with Mr. Krupp, saying she couldn't marry him because he has a funny-looking nose (the joke is that the two of them have identical noses). Mr. Krupp is angry and says he never wanted to marry her anyway; it was just a trick of George and Harold's.
Ms. Ribble tries to attack the boys, but they luckily escape. When school restarts, Ms. Ribble privately tells them that she has dropped their average grades to flunking grades, so they have to redo the fourth grade.
George and Harold decide to use their 3-D Hypno-Ring to hypnotize Ms. Ribble into changing their grades back to normal. They try to be safe about this, giving her instructions not to do anything weird like turn into wedgie woman and try to take over the world. Unfortunately, it turns out that the 3-D Hypno-Ring, when used on a woman, accidentally causes her to do the opposite of what she is hypnotized to do.
Ms. Ribble declares herself to be Wedgie Woman and attacks George and Harold in their clubhouse. Their container of super-power juice (from book 3) accidentally lands on her head, so she now has super-powered intelligence and hair. Her hair forms into several tiny hands, which can extend great distances, which is ideal for giving someone a wedgie and holding them hostage in midair.
Wedgie Woman takes the boys home and uses her super-powered intelligence to build robot copies of the two boys. The robots are equipped with Spray Starch to take away Captain Underpants's powers.
The robots pose as George and Harold's place, except the two of them behave perfectly. When Mr. Krupp snaps (literally) at them, he turns into Captain Underpants and is defeated by the two robots and their spray starch.
Wedgie Woman then gives wedgies to all the police officers in town and hangs them from traffic signs, aided by her two robots, which have expanded to gigantic size. George and Harold find Captain Underpants, who is convinced the spray starch took away his powers (it didn't) thanks to the placebo effect (mistakenly called the placenta effect by George and Harold).
George and Harold make a comic book about how Captain Underpants is impervious to spray starch is he says, "I summon the power of Underpantyworld!". Captain Underpants reads the book, says the words, and regains his powers. He then defeats the two robots.
At the showdown between Captain Underpants and Wedgie Woman, George runs away, shouting to Harold that he's going to get rid of his box of extra-strength spray starch. Hearing this, Wedgie Woman steals all the bottles in the box and sprays them everywhere.
When the smoke clears, everyone is bald (except Captain Underpants, who was already bald). The box didn't contain extra-strength spray starch; it contained hair remover and George used reverse psychology to get Wedgie Woman to use it. With her hair gone, Wedgie Woman can no longer harm anyone.
The boys hypnotize Ms. Ribble, and using reverse pyschology, they get her to lose her superpowers, forget everything that happened in the last few weeks, become the nicest teacher in the history of the school, and bake fresh cookies for the class every day.
The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby
The All-New Extra Crunchy Book o' Fun 2
Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Part 1: The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets
At Show and Tell, George and Harold show off a new prank of theirs, the squishy. The idea is to place ketchup packets under a toilet seat so the next person who sits on the toilets gets ketchup sprayed all over the back of their legs (or the front, if they push down the toilet seat while standing in front of it).
Everyone wants to try it out, but Melvin Sneedly, the bossy nerd from book 2, forces everyone to watch his Show and Tell project, which is a combining machine. Using his hamster, Sulu, and a robotic hamster body he built, Melvin combines the two so Sulu is now a bionic hamster and enjoys the special powers given to it by the robot.
Since Sulu has special powers, Sulu no longer obeys Melvin (who likes to hit Sulu with a paddle) and instead paddles Melvin. Melvin becomes furious when George and Harold adopt Sulu, when they make a Captain Underpants comic book starring Melvin as an evil tattle tale with "I love dollies" posters in his room. Finally, when Melvin becomes the victim of a squishy, he decides to get revenge.
Melvin goes home and builds a robot that is the same size as him. His idea is to combine himself with the robot so he will have special powers like Sulu, that way he can get revenge on George and Harold. Unfortunately, Melvin sneezes at the last moment, so he gets combined with the robot and boogers, turning him into a bionic booger boy.
Melvin is very disgusting now, but not unhappy because he's now the star football player (no one wants to tackle him because he's covered in boogers). When the class visits a tissue factory, Melvin becomes gigantic and evil as a natural defense against the tissues.
George and Harold get Mr. Krupp to turn into Captain Underpants to save the day. He saves his secretary from Melvin, and she gives him some wet kisses as thanks. The water from the kisses turns him back into Mr. Krupp, and he is then defeated.
Sulu comes in and defeats the Bionic Booger Boy. Melvin's parents, who are scientists, come in and pledge to try to help turn their son to normal. George and Harold's suggestion, turning the batteries in the changing machine upside down, suprisingly works, and Melvin and Mr. Krupp are brought back, with the robotic booger globs go flying off. The book ends with the robotic booger globs coming to life, destroying the changing machine, and chasing Melvin, Mr. Krupp, George, Harold, and Sulu.
Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Part 2: The Revenge of the Ridiculous Robo-boogers
The three robo-boogers are about to destroy our heroes when Sulu swallows them and then spits them into outer space. As everyone prepares to go home, it becomes obvious that there was a mistake with the change machine, and now Melvin is in Mr. Krupp's body, and vice-versa.
When Mr. Krupp (in Melvin's body) turns into Captain Underpants, George and Harold are forced to tell the secret of Captain Underpants to Melvin, who was utterly fooled by this because Captain Underpants is bald and Mr. Krupp has hair (it's strange that the kid with perfect grades couldn't see through Mr. Krupp's bad toupee).
Since it would take a long time to make a new change machine, Melvin decides to build a time machine, which is built in two days. He builds it in the library, which is run by a stereotypical book-banning librarian (this is a response to the banning of the Captain Underpants books). The idea is that no one goes to the library because it only has one book in it.
Melvin explains to George and Harold that they must be careful with the time machine, because if it's used two days in a row, some unknown bad thing will happen. George and Harold go back in time two days and retrieve the changing machine after it gets Melvin and Mr. Krupp back, but before it is smashed (they replace it with a change machine look-alike). This is done thanks to the use of a memory-erasing machine on Melvin's parents.
They go back to the time machine in the library, where the librarian steals the change machine and the memory-erasing machine. The boys go back in time and get a flying dinosaur ("Crackers"), then go back to the when the librarian stole their stuff, then get their machines back thanks to Crackers. The librarian is convinced she is dreaming because dinosaurs don't exist. Harold goes to return Crackers back to his own time, then they erase the librarian's memory and go back to their own time.
Melvin gets Captain Underpants to come to them (Captain Underpants, in Melvin's body, has been getting into trouble by doing stuff like preventing the football team from winning a game by stealing the ball, which he mistakes for a UFO). He uses the change machine to switch them, so Melvin and Mr. Krupp are in their own bodies, but Melvin sneakily gives himself Captain Underpants's superpowers.
Meanwhile, the robo-boogers in space grab onto a spaceship that was examining Uranus, where the robot and the toilets from book 2 are. They hang onto the spaceship as the spaceship goes back to Earth. Once on earth, they start destroying the spaceship center.
Captain Underpants, despite the fact that he doesn't have super-powers, decides to go after the robo-boogers. George and Harold follow him. They originally lose to the robo-boogers, but figure out that the robo-boogers die when they come into contact with oranges (the vitamin C in the oranges counteracts against the cold that made the boogers). This way, they kill Carl, one of the robo-boogers, but the other two, Trixie & Frankenbooger become cautious and dodge the oranges.
Captain Underpants defeats the robo-boogers by standing on top of a toilet store (the top of the store is a giant toilet lid) and doing an annoying dance. The robo-boogers start to climb up the buiding, when they get hit by a well-placed squishy (see book 6).
Melvin comes and lies to the news crew, saying he beat the robo-boogers with his super-powers. George and Harold sneak back to the school while Melvin is interviewed by the news people. George and Harold return with the change machine and the memory-erasing machine. They change Melvin and Captain Underpants so Captain Underpants has his powers again, then they erase the memories of the news crew (and therefore the television audience).
Melvin whines about how he's not a superhero anymore, but no one cares because he was a selfish jerk for the last two books. Melvin gets his comeuppance when the people Captain Underpants bugged while he was in Melvin's body (the football team, some old ladies, and some skateboarders) come back for revenge.
When George and Harold return to their clubhouse, George learns that Harold did not take Crackers back to the dinosaur age, but is keeping him as a pet, like Sulu. The next day, George, Harold, Sulu and Crackers go into the time machine to send Crackers back home, even though Melvin said something about not using the time machine two days in a row. The book ends with them starting the time machine, and the unknown bad thing happening.
External links
Captain Underpants official site (http://www.scholastic.com/captainunderpants/)