30: Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie!
“In the cage, now!”
“Why?!”
“Because I hate laughter, and children, and I’ve got a cage in a briefcase!”
It’s always a magnificent powerplay whenever you’ve got your hands on a popular series and you decide to title the film you’re making about it “The First movie”. Remember when Doug did that? Oh yeah. We’re really swimming in all those Doug sequels nowadays, aren’t we?
The only one I recall doing that and getting away with it is Pokémon and Pokémon was making all the money in the world so yeah of course they did. Seeing how Dreamworks is doing right now, I can’t imagine having so much confidence in that nowadays but you never know. This film is certainly filled with possibilities concerning the future adventures of George (Kevin Hart) and Harold (Thomas Middleditch). Lord knows there’s enough stories centered around them to pull from.
Seeing as I’m an adult now, the thing that I’d be the most interested in is exploring the fact that Harold is gay and seeing where that discovery about himself leads him. It’s probably not the mindset this film would want you to necessarily have though considering it’s target audience is children who probably don't care yet. I would like to say it’s also targeted towards children who grew up with the series but it’s kind of hard to say since I AM one of the children who read this series and I thought the film was good… but not a personal banger for me.
That’s probably why I keep trailing off on a bunch of other stuff here. Still, I do wish to reiterate that yes, the film is really good. It takes what was so loveable and remarkable and fun about the Captain Underpants books and translates that to the screen perfectly. It even has a bit of heart stashed away there for our man Mr. Krupp (Ed Helms). Fun fact, when I was a kid, I had no idea what a toupee was so whenever they brought it up I figured it might have just been an article of clothing or something. Context clues did eventually lead me towards figuring out they were talking about his hair but man if they had just used the word wig instead–!
Anyway, this movie is great at BEING what Captain Underpants was. It’s got incredibly brazen chutzpah to go out and just BE as deliciously childish as that series was back in the day. I’ll always respect that. They’re upfront with how ridiculous it is and how on the side of "kids being kids" they are. George and Harold are notorious pranksters and we’re supposed to want to see them get away with what they do because, hey, it’s fun. Granted, in school, I tended to grow more and more annoyed by those who acted out in class cause I mostly just wanted to get in and get out of those sewer dungeons as fast as possible and with as little a headache as I could muster but George and Harold are making the best of it in their own way.
They make the Captain Underpants comics and the absurdity of those is translated to real life when Harold uses a fucking plastic ring from a cereal box to hypnotize their principal into stripping down to his tighty whities and tying a red curtain around his neck so that he’s prancing about as Captain Underpants in full public view of everyone.
It’s a marvelous display of children humiliating the much older authority figure. It could only be better for me if that person was a Luffy or a Sabo type. But I digress.
Shenanigans ensue, as they no doubt would, until a perilous plot from the mighty Professor Poopy Pants (Nick Kroll) comes into play. Yes, that is his name. His full name is Professor Pippy Pee-Pee Diarrheastein Poopypants Esquire which is a name so long and dumb and toilet-humoresque that I can’t help but chuckle reading it aloud. I laughed at it again, just now, while revising this review. It’s the kind of name that makes me say “How dare you” with a laugh at the edge of my mouth. It’s so stupid. I love it.
But, as the quote at the top of the review notes, he’s a stick in the mud. With a name like that he can’t ever seem to find humor in his situation. That and he’s got no or at least a very small Hahaguffawchuckleamalus. What is that? Why it’s a made up lobe in the brain that makes you find things funny. George and Harold’s rival, Melvin Sneedly (Jordan Peele), is the smartest kid in school and is constantly saying “I don’t get it. What’s so funny?” to everything that happens around him. Because of this, he’s the perfect person for Professor P. to utilize in order for his machine to shrink all the Hahaguffawchuckleamaluses in the world and rid the world completely of laughter.
It’s a horrid plan for a number of reasons. It’s played off as the whims of a jerky mean adult but as an adult myself I keep coming at this from the perspective of someone who realizes just how devastating a world without laughter would be. Especially in a world that’s doing everything in its power to make me and everyone around it so consistently miserable. My reaction to hearing that Melvin physically is incapable of laughing or finding anything humorous was shock and horror. What a cursed existence. I couldn’t imagine living like that.
The movie looks amazing by the way. The style and art direction are stellar. It looks like a kids silly comic book come to life in a way that I couldn’t imagine happening during the time where I would have been this film’s target demographic.
The voice acting in the film is great too though I was a little put off by Keven Hart as George at first. I did get used to it but I do feel like this is one of those films that might have benefitted from people trying to sound more like children. Some of them do though. I’m also really impressed that Jorden Peele was able to play Melvin so well. You really wouldn’t know it was him when you sit the character design of Melvin next to a picture of that man. Principal Krupp might be my favorite of the voices though. There’s just something so bouncy about how delightfully evil he is concerning his desire to fuck with these two pranksters. The fact that he can turn that into his Captain Underpants voice so wistfully is incredible. It’s really well done.
Yeah, this is a film with a really great style, really creative dialogue, and is really true to its source material. The only reason it’s here where it is on this list is honestly just because, despite being a huge fan of the books as a kid, it just doesn’t quite hit the same way now that I’m in my early 30s. That’s not a bad thing though. I’d have loved for the magic to hit me the same way it did back then but it just didn’t manage to do that. I mean, I've never read Dog Man and I ended up enjoying that more than this, the film based on the series I actually did read. Oh well.
Thankfully, that’s not really a problem with the film itself so if you’re still in that mindset you were when facing off against these books as a kid as you are watching this film then there’s truly nothing that can go wrong for you here. Honestly.
I also really appreciate the Weird Al Yankovic song at the end. Every once in a while I find myself randomly thinking about it and singing it. I also discovered this by accident but apparently there’s a reference to Weird Al writing a song about one of the characters in one of the books before this came out. Sweet.
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13 Mar 2025 17:43 CET
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