George Beard and Harold Hutchins, the main characters of The Adventures of Captain Underpants, are pranksters of the first order. In this installment of Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants series, George and Harold pull an outrageous set of pranks at their elementary school football game. However, unbeknown to them their mean principal Mr. Krupp has caught all of their antics on videotape and he proceeds to use the tape to blackmail them into behaving well in school and serving his every whim.
After a few days of following Mr. Krupp's rules, the boys remember a comic-book advertisement for a "3-D Hypno-Ring" that will allow them to hypnotize Mr. Krupp and lay hands on the incriminating videotape. George and Harold follow through with their plan, and in the process have some fun with Mr. Krupp, making him believe he is Captain Underpants--George and Harold's favorite superhero in their homemade comic books--while he is under their hypnotic spell. Silly high jinks ensue.
This book has tremendous subjective appeal: kids will love it (mine do...). The chief thing that makes it appealing is humor. For example, Pilkey's turn of phrase itself is often hilarious. In the introductory chapter he describes George and Harold as kids who were "usually responsible...Whenever anything bad happened, George and Harold were usually responsible." Kids will also think the fantastic nature and scale of the boys' pranks is funny. For example, they put black pepper in the cheerleaders' pom-poms causing the cheerleaders to sneeze uncontrollably, they put bubble bath in the marching band's horns so the band's playing just ends up blowing bubbles, and they replace the football team's muscle rub lotion with "Mr. Prankster's Extra-Scratchy Itching Cream." And of course the potty-humor theme throughout the book appeals to a child's (seemingly natural, if my kids are any indication) proclivity for all things potty'ish.
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