Hello my beautiful watchers and welcome back to lost in adaptation, the web show about comparing
films to the books they're based on. Today we get to have a look at a heartwarming tale of
a middle aged man who constantly undresses in front of two preteen boys... Tell me I'm wrong.
Captain Underpants is a series of picture books created by American author and illustrator David
“Dav” Pilkey. The first issue was released in 1997 and to date has run for 12 installments.
The general set up is: two young boys, George and Harold attempt to evade punishment for a string
of pranks by hypnotizing their tyrannical school principal Mr Krupp into thinking that he’s Captain
Underpants, the superhero of their amateur comic books, then they have to run around after him
trying to keep him from harm as he attempts to actually fight crime and supervillains.
Eventually switching him back and forth between his real personality and his
superhero alter ego becomes possible, and he actually gains superpowers down the line
so summoning him becomes an actual solution to alien invasions or killer toilet attacks.
The books tended to be fairly light on in the words department as is
the way of picture books for a young audience and
they often incorporate a flipbook element to depict simple action sequences.
Despite this set up and the title, this really doesn't feel like a superhero story.
The main theme appears to be more focused on the kids defying authority and being themselves and
Captain Underpants often feels downright secondary to that.
This actually led to something of a revelation for me. You see, ever since I started bemoaning my age
to friends and family I’ve been vehemently assured that 34 isn’t old but now I have proof! You see
this is a picture book about the young sticking it to the old and I find myself siding with the old.
I just want these little brats to shut up and stop making life hard for their overworked and
underpaid teachers and yes, that includes the unnecessarily aggressive principle.
Admittedly I don’t condone the blackmail and free child labour he extorts but his
attempts to stop them from constantly pranking everyone at the school I’m hard in favor of.
Just give me my cane and a cloud to yell at.
Now that I’ve got that out of my system I’m now going
to pull a complete 180 and talk about the value of these books.
Pilkey apparently went through a lot of shit in his youth, being a lad with dyslexia and
ADHD in a school system that clearly had no understanding of these things and equivocated
his difficulties with intentional misbehaviour so you know, HARD relate on literally every part.
These books clearly were an outlet for a lot of the feelings he built up in that time and
a way for him to help kids going through the same thing parse their feelings and
by all accounts it seems he was pretty successful in that so big up’s to him.
I was shocked to discover these books faced as much backlash as they did.
They actually hit number one on the list of most banned books in america in 2012,
beating out Fifty Shades of Grey. People were more ok with
butt plugs and abusive relationships than they were kids laughing at toilet jokes.
Complaints against them seem to vary wildly in legitimacy. The most common seems to be pearl
clutching regarding the themes of misbehaving at school and while I have shared my own geriatric
opinion on that, the idea of banning the books because of it is absolutely ludicrous.
There were however slightly more justified complaints directed at an unfortunate book
that he created outside of the Captain Underpants series titled The Adventures of Ook and Gluk:
Kung-Fu Cavemen from the Future, which depicted multiple harmful racial stereotypes.
To the man's credit, Pilkey didn’t pull a washed up comedian move and double down
or blame PC culture. He acknowledged his mistake and supported the discontinuation of the book,
leading me to believe his claims that it was a well intentioned attempt to
show diversity that was simply phenomenally badly delivered.
Moving onto the film, apparently Dreamworks Entertainment were eyeing up this series for
adaptation as far back as the first issue but met resistance from Pilkey who was not convinced they
would do justice to his story. Allegedly they even went as far as to invite him to
their studio and give him a tour while wearing their underpants outside of their trousers.
Pilkey still held back on auctioning off the rights until 2011 after which
Dreamworks immediately snapped them up.
Robert Letterman was originally slated to direct but eventually switched to an
executive producer role and David Soren of Madagascar fame took up the reins.
Kevin Hart and Thomas Middleditch were cast as the leads along with Ed Helms, Nick Kroll,
Kristen Shaal, Brian Posen, Leslie David Baker, Grey DeLisle and Jordan Peele.
Oh and Weird Al Yankovic was brought in to write the songs. More movies should do that.
It premiered in 2017 with the title Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie. To date
it remains the ONLY movie BUT it did spawn a Netflix spin off series that ran successfully
for four seasons so it's not quite another tale of hubris leading to an embarrassing name..
Ironically, after courting it for so long, after an internal reorganization Dreamworks
ended up outsourcing the animation of the movie to companies in Canada and France.
This resulted in the eventual movie being something of a black sheep of the
Dreamworks family with a more unique look than their usual productions.
Right, let's talk adaptation.
Because the four storylines of the books are mashed together into one,
as opposed to occurring sequentially, the parts of the film that are true to the
source material come off more like references and callbacks than direct adaptations BUT
to be fair, there are a lot of them which counts for something.
George and Harold’s string of pranks at their school, leading to Principal Krupp developing
an obsessive need to catch them in the act and punish them,
eventually capturing the lads’ mischief on camera.
Their desperate last ditch attempt to escape the consequences by using a toy hypnosis ring on him,
which (against all expectations) actually works.
Having him run through a bunch of humiliating activities before
forcing him to assume the persona of their OC superhero.
“Captain Underpants” immediately escaping out of a window and stumbling into foiling a bank robbery.
The lads discovering they can reset his mind back to being Krupp by dumping water on him,
and Underpantsing it up again every time someone snaps their fingers.
A Professor from a place called New Switzerland, unfortunately named Poopypants, getting a job as
the school science teacher and eventually being driven into a murderous rage by the children’s
constant laughter and attempting to lay waste to the world using a shrink ray and giant robot.
The boys and their naked adult friend attempting to save the day,
resulting in Captain Underpants actually getting super powers and life briefly
returning to normal before they’re dragged into another adventure with the monster they
created. By that I mean Captain Underpants not the toilets I..just in case that wasn’t clear.
While Dreamworks’s decision to animate the movie outside of their usual pipeline was undoubtedly
fiscally motivated, a happy side effect of this was it was VERY close to Pilkey’s original art.
It’s like they took them straight off the page and made them 3D.
Impressively, the film managed to work in references to the fourth wall breaking the
boy’s occasionally took part in, their constant concern that things are getting
too violent for child content and the flip-o-ramas. I would have expected
this to come off as awkward and forced but the charisma of the actors really sells it.
The movie leans more overtly into the book's main theme of extolling the virtue of the
kid’s friendship with each other and the beauty of their childish senses of humour.
This actually pushes Captain Underpants into the background in the climax,
which is something that apparently happened quite often in later sequels.
Oh and they included the giant hand from the book. So there's that. Giant hand, check.
[Then I’ll take this-ow! Did you just slap me? Yes I did! And you deserved it.
No I didn’t! Your hand is huge! That hurt a lot!
Now I admitted my old man bias on this already so take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt,
but I think one of the most significant changes in the film
is the kids are no longer TOTAL assholes. Just hear me out.
Unlike in the film, in which George and Harold’s pranks were motivated
by wanting to cheer their classmates up and exclusively targeting them at the deserving,
resulting in fun and laughter for all, the little snots of the comic tended to target everyone,
making the entire school miserable (the book’s own words) and amusing only themselves.
They glued everyone’s asses to their seats, presumably ruining their clothing,
they sabotaged the other kids’ science projects that they clearly worked very hard on
(look at this kids miserable face LOOK AT IT), they gaslit a teacher into questioning his own
sanity, drive multiple members of staff into resigning their
jobs and spoiled the lunch ladies attempt to surprise the entire school with delicious muffins.
On top of that, in the book they caused most of the problems they then needed to fix with Captain
Underpants. They literally created several super villains just by being little assholes.
I just… you know I totally endorse the “they’re just kids being kids and trying to
have fun” thing but it comes at the expense of the happiness of everyone around them.
Again, I know this makes me exactly like the old people that Pilkey calls out and makes
fun of in his books but the filmmakers clearly saw it too because they removed all this stuff.
By being so much more discerning about who they messed with and how they went about it,
George and Harold of the movie are way more likeable in comparison.
Moving on like many stories based on children's media that were originally released some time ago,
the film has updated its humour somewhat to appeal to the adults its audience have now become.
Nothing too egregious, just some little jokes here and there.
Though on the flip side, they seem to have removed a few (I assume)
accidental innuendos from the original. Wow.
Instead of forcing them to do increasingly inappropriate tasks for him, film Krupp decides
to use his evidence of wrongdoing to justify splitting the boys into separate classes to ruin
their friendship. Still a dick move but at least not something the FBI might need to look into.
Melvin the nerdy snitch and Poopypants are made more obviously evil to reduce the moral
ambiguity to the boys’ poor treatment of them and, in an unexpected move,
the film also works towards humanising Krupp. The Kids find out he leads kind
of a lonely life and end up setting him up on a date after the climax.
Because of the new medium the film plays around with some fast paced
humour that's not really possible in written form,
especially in the way Krupp can be switched back and forth between his two personalities.
[Tra-la-laaa! Harold! Tra-la-George! Laaaa!
We should probably stop. Yeah we probably should.
Stop doing this! Tra-la-aahh!
There were some things that fell to the wayside as they combined the four stories
but not as much as you might think. Many things weren't exactly as they appeared in the book but
few things were completely ignored which is actually pretty impressive. It was basically
a few of the monsters of the week. Generic evil villains and some aliens with unusual motivations.
The only thing I think fans of the book would have been just a little disappointed not to
see was the choose your own silly name thing that the professor wanted to use to punish
the whole world with, but was clearly intended for the reader to be able to take part in.
[Oh no. Nice try. Turtle and I have
grown quite attached. We’re inseparable actually. I carry him wherever I go. Including the SHOWER!
Oh! That poor turtle.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Taking into account that this could never be a word for word adaptation, (even if the book had
HAD enough words for that to be feasible), because its four stories mushed together,
I think this was a pretty faithful adaptation of the main theme and feel of the original.
I also liked that they not only recognised, but accentuated the
core message of “shut up and let kids enjoy their toilet humour you old gits”.
It is also one of the best examples of said story-mushing that I’ve seen in awhile,
and I was also impressed with how well it handled incorporating the new humour to
match the audience and new medium without changing where the humor derived from.
All in all I’m glad this film did well despite getting completely
overshadowed by Wonder Woman at the box office. According to my survey it seems
like a lot of the book’s fanbase haven't actually seen it so in the unlikely event
that you were waiting for someone random to give it a seal of approval, it's got mine.
Thank you for joining me, my beautiful watchers. Don’t forget to do that good good
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Take care of yourselves out there and I hope to see you next time.