Captain Underpants First Official Image, Joins Super Hero Movie Craze
With the trend of superhero movies still going strong, another captain will be making his debut on the big screen soon. After capturing the hearts of so many children beginning in the late 1990s, Captain Underpants will be having his own feature film mid-2017.
A first official image went up online through Entertainment Weekly and it is sporting a CG-style animation with plenty of expression. The image features the title character, Captain Underpants, posing in his heroic stance as the two kids Harold and George are keeling over in laughter.
#CaptainUnderpants leaps to the big screen in this exclusive first look: https://t.co/nSdfx2J9Tq pic.twitter.com/WMrcmxg3ym
— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) December 25, 2016
For those unfamiliar with the Captain Underpants story, it follows the mischievous adventures of George Beard and Harold Hutchins, two best friends who attend Jerome Horwitz Elementary School and are constantly getting themselves into trouble. The school principal, Mr. Krupp, along with the rest of the school staff are one of the most despicable group of adults to ever be in charge of a fictional school.
This perhaps comes from the author Dav Pilkey’s experience in elementary school, where he often got in trouble due to suffering from ADHD and dyslexia. The two boys in George and Harold are reflections of their creator and the Captain Underpants stories are fantastical imaginings of Pilkey’s experiences as a child.
One day, the two kids have had enough of their principal’s abuse and hypnotize him to believe that he is the superhero Captain Underpants, a character from the pages of George and Harold’s comic books that they have created. Intended as just a prank, it went further than they boys expected, the principal turned superhero shared the same amount of exuberance as his comic book counterpart. Captain Underpants would run off and try to perform dangerous feats, and it was George and Harold who tried to keep him in check.
As a hobby, much like George and Harold did, Pilkey wrote and drew their own comic books and sold them to students on the playground. As much as the other kids applauded Dav, his teachers were much less inclined to praise him. One teacher even ripped up his comics and told him to grow up, he recalled to CNN. The rest would become history, as it turns out, as Pilkey used that as a source of motivation to conjure his Captain Underpants stories.
Since the beginning, there have been 12 books within the main Captain Underpants series along with several spin-offs. With all of these novels, there is one constant: silly childish humor. Appropriately, the movie will feature some big players in the comedy world. Captain Underpants will be featuring the voices of Ed Helms (The Office, The Hangover) as Mr. Krupp/Captain Underpants, Kevin Hart (Get Hard, Ride Along) as George, and Thomas Middleditch (Silicon Valley) as Harold.
“[Helms] has managed to tap into the sheer stupidity of Captain Underpants,” director David Soren told EW. “He’s a delusional superhero who thinks he’s got all kinds of powers and has literally zero ability beyond just that of a middle-aged man.”
The villain of choice to go against Captain Underpants will be Professor Pippy P. Poopypants, voiced by Nick Kroll (Sausage Party), who in the novels was one of the most brilliant minds the world had ever seen. Due to his ridiculous name, none of his peers would take him or his inventions seriously, so he decided to teach at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School in the hopes of passing his knowledge to young minds. However, things would go no better there, as the kids could not contain their laughter at the sound of his name. Poopypants would look to force the rest of the world to change into ridiculous names so that he could fit in at last. It is entirely possible that the Captain Underpants film could follow the same plot points.
Captain Underpants will hit theaters on June 2, 2017.
[Featured Image by PRNewsFoto/Scholastic Corporation]
