wedgie power (Adventures of Captain Underpants, The: An epic Novel - Dav Pilkey)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Adventures of Captain Underpants, The: An epic Novel - Dav Pilkey
Date:	05/11/01 (119 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Pants.

Disadvantages: Pants.

OK, it was like this. I still haven't got hold of the fourth Harry Potter book,
and that's why I was sneaking around in the kids section, your Honour, when this book, Captain Underpants, just happened to catch my eye.
I remembered seeing it listed, but unopped, on dooyoo, so duty called...
Luckily there were no pesky kids around at the time so I got away with it.


Dav Pilkey promises action, thrills, and laffs in his self-proclaimed 'epic novel' (well, it is more than a hundred pages) in which we are introduced to Captain Underpants, whose true identity is so secret, even he doesn't know who he is! We do though, and we know who created him ...

George Beard and Harold Hutchins are Elementary School 4th graders. George has a flat head and a treehouse, but no beard (maybe his dad was in ZZ Top, I don't know) while his next-door neighbour Harold just has a bad haircut.

"George and Harold were usually responsible kids. Whenever anything bad happened, George and Harold were usually responsible."

George likes to make up stories and Harold likes drawing, so together they make their own comics, which they photocopy, and sell, at school.
Well, we've all done a bit of that in our time, haven't we? Their comics
feature the adventures of superheroes such as "Timmy the Talking Toilet", "The Amazing Cow Lady" and coolest of them all - "The Amazing Captain Underpants" - who can leap tall buildings without getting a wedgie!

Their comic is reproduced here so you can see for yourself how Captain Underpants saves a school from the Inedible Hunk - a monster which
has sprung to life from horrible cafeteria food dumped in a trash can.
School dinners are clearly as unpopular over there as they are here!

The boys gets into BIG trouble when Mr. Krupp, their children-hating principal, secretly installs surveillance devices everywher
e...
(Actually, we had those when I was a kid, they were called mothers.)
But then George sends off for something he sees advertised at the back of a magazine, and a silly sequence of action-packed events ensues.

There are lots of illustrations of course (only in black & white though),
not to mention Flip-O-Rama "the latest in cheesy animation technology"
(yep, you've guessed it - you flick the pages backwards and forwards.)
But most importantly it's funny, and the world needs more funny books.


Some schools in America are boycotting book fairs which promote
the panted superhero - they consider the illustrations "inappropriate"
for primary school and nursery children. As one concerned teacher said:

"One of them shows the wicked wedgie woman sticking her hand down
a boy's pants to give him a wedgie. That's definitely not appropriate when you're trying to focus on character education."

Quite.

Stop sniggering at the back!


¶ Paperback: £3.99 ¶ pp 128 ¶ ISBN: 0439014573 ¶
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