The Adventures of Captain Underpants by Dav Pilkey

Best friends George and Harold create the greatest superhero of all time : Captain Underpants! The school troublemakers pull out their best pranks at the big football game and are caught on videotape by their principal, mean old Mr. Krupp. Mr. Krupp threatens to release the videotape of their hijinks to the football team if they don't follow a strict list of demands. Fearing the wrath of the football team for costing them the big game they comply and behave like perfect angels for weeks upon miserable weeks.

Fed up with being good boys, the friends devise a plan to hypnotize Mr. Krupp into handing over the videotape by using a gimmicky 3-D Hypno-Ring. The plan works and the boys switch the incriminating tape with Harold's little sister's "Boomer the Purple Dragon Sing-A-Long" tape. The boys play around making Mr. Krupp act like a monkey and a chicken and finally Captain Underpants!

Harold and George really have their hands full following Captain Underpants around on his mission to search out and fight crime. Captain Underpants meets his match in Dr. Diaper, the little criminal whose robots steal a crystal to power the Lasermatic 2000 which was created to blow up the moon sending huge chunks of it crashing to the Earth's surface enabling Dr. Diaper to rise up from the mess and take over. To make a long story short, Captain Underpants prevails with the help of Harold and George, aka the Robot bashers, and they get away delivering evil Dr. Diaper to the police on their way back to school.

Back at school, Harold and George attempt to undo their hypnosis, but because they can't find the directions they struggle to bring back mean old Mr. Krupp. Finally, they pour water over his head which seems to do the trick, but if they had read the directions they would've noticed that pouring water over someone in a trance will only cause them to slip back and forth between trance and reality whenever they hear the sound of finger snapping!

This book primarily appeals to 4th grade and older boys, but can also be enjoyable for girls as well. Each page contains illustrations and perhaps the best feature is Flip-O-Rama the unique illustration technique that allows kids to animate the action by flipping quickly back and forth between two pages.

Genre: Realistic Fiction/Fantasy

Pilkey, D. (1997). The adventures of Captain Underpants: an epic novel. New York: Blue Sky Press.