This book has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine. It is the 10th book in the “Captain Underpants” series.
This book has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine. It is the 10th book in the “Captain Underpants” series.
Fourth-graders George Beard and Harold Hutchins have created their own comic superhero named Captain Underpants. They begin this book by drawing a comic for readers that recaps how they developed the character. They also show how they accidentally brought it to life when they hypnotized their principal. Now whenever someone snaps his fingers, Mr. Krupp turns into Captain Underpants and fights crime wearing only his briefs and a curtain for a cape.
Their comic also recaps their previous adventure, in which evil professor Tippy Tinkletrousers built a robo-suit shaped like a giant pair of pants. The suit is also a time machine, which he used to escape from Captain Underpants. Tippy went back five years in time to George’s and Harold’s school. Some bullies saw him and got so scared, they went crazy.
Mr. Krupp was blamed for the incident and fired. The comic shows that back in present day, the world is in chaos. Since Krupp wasn’t George’s and Harold’s principal, he never became Captain Underpants, and he never saved the world. When Tippy returns to present day and sees the mess he’s made, he realizes he has to go back and keep Mr. Krupp from getting fired.
Tippy once again goes back in time five years. He uses his freeze ray to temporarily freeze the bullies. Then he confronts his other self and explains why they can’t scare the bullies. Just to keep an eye on himself, present-day Tippy shrinks his earlier self and puts him in his pocket.
Meanwhile in present day, Tippy becomes angry when some police officers laugh at his name. He freezes them with his freeze ray and then begins to chase George and Harold. They decide to save their pets, Sula and Crackers, by sending them back in time using the Purple Potty time machine created by their classmate, Melvin. They get in the machine with the pets, and Mr. Krupp follows behind them. When they travel 65 million years back in time, Mr. Krupp is sucked back with them.
Tippy, who was just about to freeze them, sends Tiny Tippy back in time 10 minutes so he can overhear where the kids and Krupp went. Tiny Tippy completes his mission and returns to Tippy, who now has two Tiny Tippys. The three Tippys travel back to the Mesozoic era to find the boys and Captain Underpants.
Sixty-five million years earlier, the Tippys catch up with the others and demolish the Purple Potty. The boys snap their fingers to propel Captain Underpants into action. While Tippy gives chase, the two smaller Tippys grow tired of his bravado. They decide to go forward in time to grab the Goosy Grow 4000 device. One Tippy points it at the other, and he grows to 30 feet tall. The smaller Tippy then demands he be enlarged as well, but the gigantic Tippy refuses.
Regular-sized Tippy fights Captain Underpants until the newly enlarged Tippy, called Supa Mega Tippy, appears. The two Tippys fight over who will get to destroy Captain Underpants, and Supa Mega Tippy detonates a bomb that triggers the start of the Cenozoic era. Supa Mega Tippy blasts into the Pleistocene epoch, with Captain Underpants, the boys and their pets close behind.
Supa Mega Tippy ties Krupp up in water to render him powerless. Meanwhile, the boys try to communicate with the local cavepeople. When they can’t do so with language, they create a lengthy, wordless comic by drawing on cave walls. The comic inspires the cavepeople to stop fearing Supa Mega Tippy and start finding ways to defeat him.
They trip him, tar him, set him on fire and do various other things before he tries his freeze ray on them. He doesn’t know that Tiny Tippy has tinkered with the freeze ray. Tiny Tippy enlarges himself to be 120 feet tall. The Tippys inadvertently start the ice age.
The boys and cavepeople try to untie Krupp. Just as everyone is about to become frozen, Tiny Tippy (who is now the largest Tippy) grabs everyone. The boys snap their fingers, and Captain Underpants awakens. He rips the trousers off of Tippy and uses them to make a gigantic hammock in which everyone can ride. Captain Underpants then shuttles them across the ocean to Southern France, where he leaves the cavepeople. Then he, the boys and the pets return to find the new largest Tippy so he can give them a ride back to present day.
Tippy doesn’t return them to present day, but to 30 years in the future. George and Harold are terrified to realize that, as adults, they’ve become the same kind of mean teachers they always despised. The boys, who had just vowed to make better choices after all this, decide to undo their vow. Their mean, older selves disappear. The boys snap their fingers and together, old and young Captain Underpants battle Tippy.
Tippy starts to detonate another bomb. Sula and Crackers start to push buttons in his robo-pants. The pets and Tippy are blasted back 13.7 billion years to a time before anything existed. When the bomb explodes, it causes the universe to spring into existence and rapidly expand. It begins to cool and the energy becomes converted into subatomic particles, which then form atoms and become matter.
Thirty years in the future, the boys and Captain Underpants find that Crackers, who they thought was a boy, has left three pterodactyl eggs. They try to keep them warm while wondering how to return to present day. Melvin, the brainiac who created the Purple Potty, comes from the past to retrieve them and take them home in his robotic squid suit.
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Characters travel back in time millions of years through different prehistoric eras. Evolution is mentioned. The narrator explains that what scientists refer to as the Big Bang was actually the explosion of Tippy’s 160-ton thermonuclear bomb.
Principal Krupp will stop at nothing to catch the boys at their pranks. When Krupp becomes Captain Underpants, he and the boys work together to fight bad guys. The narrator mocks adults in general for being grumpy and hopeless. He explains that their disappointment in themselves for decades of failure and personal compromise causes them to ruin kids’ fun.
The words heck, darned and butt appear. Several humorous warning pages appear, stating that extremely graphic violence will be shown in the pages that follow. What actually appears is mild cartoon violence, such as a person being hit in the head or having his nose hairs pulled. No blood or serious injuries are depicted.
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Bathroom humor and general grossness: Silly cartoon drawings, which appear frequently throughout the book, depict Captain Underpants as a pudgy, bald man wearing fitted white briefs and a red cape. The large underpants never reveal any hint of the anatomy beneath. What appears to be a bloody person squashed under a giant foot turns out to be a squished ketchup packet. Tippy Tinkletrousers has a giant pair of robo-pants. He frequently pops his head through the zipper fly. A song in this book talks about drinking pee pee and eating poo poo.
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