  | Full Text Reviews: School Library Journal - 06/01/1999 Gr 3-6This epic novel opens with an introductory cartoon strip that tells the top-secret truth about how two kids, George and Harold, used the 3-D Hypno-Ring to hypnotize their principal, who now becomes Captain Underpants whenever he hears fingers snaping. In this second adventure, the boys are banned from attending the annual Invention Convention and sent to detention to keep them out of trouble. This, of course, is impossible, so they sneak into the school that evening and tamper with all of the inventions to wreak havoc. They also make copies of their newest comic strip of vicious attack toilets and the daddy monster of them all Turbo Toilet 2000. The copy machine is an invention that duplicates into live matter all images it copies and the attack toilets come to life. The wild story actually comes to a logical conclusion, but it really doesn't matter. The fun is in the reading, which is full of puns, rhymes, and nonsense along with enough revenge and wish fulfillment for every downtrodden fun-seeking kid who never wanted to read a book. The cartoon drawings and the amazing flip-o-rama pages make this book so appealing that youngsters wont notice that their vocabulary is stretching. Hooray for Captain Underpants! Watch him fly off your shelves. Marlene Gawron, Orange County Library, Orlando, FL Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information. - Copyright 1999 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission. Bulletin for the Center... - 05/01/1999 A book featuring superhero Captain Underpants and a fleet of man-eating toilets is pretty much reviewer-proof, but you might as well know it’s here. Those familiar with the Captain’s previous flight (The Adventures of Captain Underpants) will understand that Captain Underpants is just the principal, who responds to a post-hypnotic suggestion by becoming said officer of unmentionables from time to time—the real heroes are George and Harold, lovable fourth-graders with a slight tendency towards mischief. In this outing, George and Harold intend to copy their Captain Underpants comic book and accidentally use the genius-nerd’s science project, which brings pictured images to three-dimensional reality. This results in carnivorous toilets galloping through the school, chanting “yum, yum, eat ’em up” and consuming all the teachers, until the boys elicit regurgitation by feeding the commodes cafeteria food and then trounce the Turbo Toilet with a hastily created super Robo-Plunger. The format cobbles together regular text, comic-panel pages, joking disclaimers, and a truthfully advertised “cheesy animation technique” that makes flip books look slick by comparison, but that’s the point—this is dopey fun. The combination of total departure from reality, smirky insider humor (“They’ll never let us get away with that in a children’s book!” exclaims George at one point), and crucial taboos as plot points will draw middle-graders like magnets. There’s no depth or expansion in the story, just the one relentlessly glib note, so proceedings spin out over rather a long time. The effect is one of reading a television cartoon, one designed by third-graders with unusual concentration; the simply lined black-and-white illustrations (which make the boys vaguely reminiscent of streamlined Calvins from Calvin and Hobbes) have a polish that third-graders wouldn’t manage, but they provide all the yucks that fans could wish. A tome for the ages this ain’t, but it’ll make kids laugh until soda comes out of their noses. - Copyright 1999 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Loading...
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