Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Epic Tales Of Captain Underpants’ On Netflix, Where Two Smart-Alecks Turn Their Mean Principal Into A Superhero

Have your kids been addicted to Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants novels at some point in their lives? There’s a good reason why the books have sold over 80 million copies; they’re funny, irreverent, and has just enough fart humor to make any preteen happy. After last year’s movie version of the novels (Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie) was a hit, DreamWorks commissioned a series for Netflix with a serious pedigree: EP Peter Hastings has written for Animaniacs, Pinky & The Brain and the Kung Fu Panda movies. Will fans of the books love the series?

THE EPIC TALES OF CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Two buddies meet outside their houses. A narrator says: “Meet George Beard and Harold Hutchins. George is the one on the left with the tie and the flattop. Harold is the one on the right with the t-shirt and the bad haircut. Remember that now.”

The Gist: George (Jay Gragani) and Harold (Ramone Hamilton) are 4th graders at Jerome Horowitz Elementary School. They’re smart, resourceful kids but love to be silly; for instance, they jumble the letters on the school sign to read “Smell Your Own Stinky Feet.” Their principal, Mr. Krupp (Nat Faxon) is constantly after the boys to obey his rules because he hates fun and wants to squash it at every turn. He’s had the two in his office 422 times, and if the counter he’s installed in his office gets to 500 by the end of the school year, “I get to send you to a work farm where you get to milk goats!” Did we say that Mr. Krupp is a bit on edge?

For playing the prank on the sign, he assigns the boys to P.E., with the threat that if they don’t go they’ll get perpetual Saturday detention. All the kids get out of it, including Melvin Sneedly (Jorge Diaz), the smartest kid in school who invents a machine that pumps his arms so he can pass the strength test the teacher, Mr. Meaner (David Koechner) sets up as a test to get out of P.E. To relieve their boredom, the kids write a comic about their hero, Captain Underpants defeating The Flabby Farts of Flabby Fabulous, who looks a lot like Mr. Meaner.

Mr. Meaner eventually finds the comic and comes after the boys, then accidentally gets his butt expanded by Sneedly’s invention — just like in their comic! But the boys have something up their sleeves, as the show’s intro and its friendly narrator (Sean Astin) tells us: They’ve hypnotized Mr. Krupp so that when they snap their fingers, Krupp becomes Captain Underpants for real (still voiced by Faxon), who isn’t bright but is pretty powerful. Only when Underpants is doused with water does he turn back into Mr. Krupp, who’s always wondering why he’s standing somewhere without anything but his tighty whities on.

Our Take: Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants novels for young readers have sold over 80 million copies, as the show’s press release points out, and there’s a good reason why; it’s about friendship, turning the mean principal into a hero, and overall goofiness. The pace and visual style of the series is more akin to the novels than the hit movie from 2017 was, split into chapters with funny names and multiple visual styles. In the first episode alone, we see stick puppets within the first minute, then a couple of segments where Harold, George, and the big-butted Mr. Meaner are represented by sock puppets.

What we love about the show is how self-aware it is. Yes, many, many cartoons these days are self-aware, but since this is baked into the DNA of the show from the first seconds (every episode has the boys rearrange the letters from “A Netflix Original Series” into a funny phrase like “Alien Toenail Fries” or “Large Fart Noise”), so you come to expect asides, shifts to kids’ drawings, and jokes where the narrator — Astin at his most avuncular — wants to protect viewers’ ears and eyes from the violence that’s about to happen.

Other fun stuff: Popular girl Jessica Gordon (Dayci Brookshire) is always worried about her mound of “har” (how she pronounces “hair”), and executive producer Peter Hastings (who worked on the equally anarchic Anamaniacs and Pinky and the Brain) narrates the boys’ comics like a stoner who just got done doing a wicked routine on the halfpipe.

The jokes in the show will make your inner 12-year-old laugh, but there’s more than enough sophisticated humor to make you laugh. In the second episode, where Krupp auditions DJs for his “Enchanted Waiting Room” Dance (remember: he hates fun, but is obligated by the Constitution, of all things, to mount a school dance), Sneedly arrives in a DJ robot, but is rejected. “Nobody rejects my robot-based, retro-feature 8-bit MIDI music and gets away with it!” Only the olds like us (and the nerdy olds at that) will get that reference.

What Age Group Is This For?: It’s rated TV-Y7, but we can’t imagine the frenzied pace, cartoon violence and bodily function jokes would be suitable for any kid under 10, and that’s pushing it. This one may be more for kids 12 and up.

Parting Shot: Jessica ends up pumping up her “har” with Sneedly’s machine. But after Captain Underpants defeats the large-butted Mr. Meaner, she wants even bigger “har”, using “this dryer thingie.” The last shot is pretty much all hair.

Funniest Gag: At the end of Chapter 1, George asks Krupp if there’s anything they can do to get out of P.E. The answer is given with the title of Chapter 2, “No, There’s Not.”

Our Call: Stream It. Great voice acting, fun animation, and funny stories that both kids and their immature parents (like us) can get into. What more do you want in an animated series?

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants on Netflix