This book has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine.
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 cartoon.
George and Harold are up to their usual tricks. They pull a prank on the cafeteria ladies, causing them to make a batter that explodes and gushes through the halls of the school. The disgruntled lunch ladies quit. No one has noticed that a spaceship carrying three aliens has landed on top of the school building. The aliens, dressed in wigs and make-up, apply for the open cafeteria jobs, and turn the students into evil zombie nerds. They plan to use their army of children to take over the world.
Since George and Harold were sentenced to lunchtime in the principal’s office, they’re the only kids who don’t eat the cafeteria food and become zombie nerds. They tell Mr. Krupp what’s happened, but the principal has been duped by them too many times and doesn’t believe them. George and Harold battle the three aliens with kitchen utensils, but the aliens call in their army of zombie nerds. George and Harold know this is a job for Captain Underpants, and they snap their fingers to send him into action.
The boys and Captain Underpants think they’re escaping from the zombie nerds but find themselves jailed inside the aliens’ spaceship. They use some of the aliens’ Ultra Nasty Self-Destruct juice to blow up the spaceship. Then the boys give Captain Underpants the aliens’ Super Evil Rapid-Growth Juice to save him from a gigantic, evil dandelion. The juice gives Captain Underpants the power to fly. The kids then pour Anti-Evil-Zombie-Nerd Juice into root beer and give it to all the students. The kids return to normal.
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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.
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Bathroom humor: 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. He often fights bad guys using Wedgie Power. The large underpants never reveal any hint of the anatomy beneath. George and Harold change letters on the cafeteria sign to say pee-pee and toilets. In George and Harold’s Captain Underpants comic, the zombie lunch ladies are able to leap a tall building by passing gas that lifts them into the air.
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