Latest / Privycast / Ep. 215 Captain Underpants and Toilet Supervillains
Transcript
- 0:01Well I'm gonna say is there's some last names that don't work if you're a school teacher.
- 0:09Doesn't matter any grade.
- 0:10Any grade in the single digits, it's not gonna work.
- 0:18Welcome back to Privy.
- 0:20Privy is a podcast about bathrooms recorded from my home bathroom.
- 0:27I'm your host, Hunter Hoover, and I love bathrooms.
- 0:32Welcome back, everybody.
- 0:33Thank you for being here.
- 0:34And fall is fully in the air.
- 0:37Now, I will note by the point of this episode's release, I'm hoping that my the next thing I have to say is not true.
- 0:46But
- 0:47At the point of this episode's record, it's the first week in September that I'm recording.
- 0:51I'm recording a little bit ahead of a time.
- 0:54And at the point of this episode's record, the Sintis Corporation still has not announced the finalists or opened up the voting for the 2026 America's Best Restroom competition.
- 1:11Like, j just look at this.
- 1:13Look at this.
- 1:14Let me, let me, let me just show you.
- 1:16The frustration that I
- 1:20Like these people still be out here saying
- 1:26That uh I can nominate, nominate a bathroom for 2026.
- 1:32That's crazy.
- 1:34That's absolutely bonkers because here in just but a couple weeks, we are going to be less than a quarter of 2026 left.
- 1:44They have got to get this on lockdown.
- 1:47It's it's just unbelievable that we would continue to behave this way.
- 1:53Sintis Corporation.
- 1:55If you're hearing this, you you gotta some of us care a little bit more than you, I guess, is what we're learning.
- 2:01Get somebody on it, please.
- 2:04I wait in the winds as Sintis Corp is going to intrude.
- 2:08I know.
- 2:09At this point, they're gonna have to intrude on spoop key season, which is just inconsiderate.
- 2:14Because if you're intruding on spoop key season, you're intruding on twist season, and that's gonna piss me off.
- 2:22Dang it.
- 2:24The end of September, we often bat to a topic when Sintis can't get their stuff in order.
- 2:31We bat to a topic
- 2:33For our comic book episode, because the end of September hails with National Comic Book Day.
- 2:42In fact, if you're listening to this episode on the day it releases, today is National Comic Book Day.
- 2:51We haven't really talked about the history of National Comic Book Day.
- 2:56So before we dive into another and frankly long overdue bathroom comic book hero or villain, we need to look at some of the history of national comic book.
- 3:11The trouble with National Comic Book Day is that it is, in all admission, a completely made up and honestly weird holiday of cultural observance.
- 3:25When you try to look up and look into the history of National Comic Book Day, it turns out that the official history is also that it was just kind of made up.
- 3:37The internet hails the origins of National Comic Book Day as a mystery, which is online speak to say it's kinda pointless and was completely fabricated.
- 3:49I should also note, National Comic Book Day is also different than
- 3:55Free comic book day.
- 3:57And in all my looking, free comic book day is in like May or something like that.
- 4:02I don't know.
- 4:03But in all my looking, I only had one real lead on the matter.
- 4:09There was a blog post, link in the ding dong below.
- 4:12You can go look at this for yourself.
- 4:13I I think this is wild.
- 4:15There's a link in and from a blog post from the Somerset County Library System.
- 4:21Let's see if we can let's see if we can pull this up.
- 4:24Yeah, and in it, this this library system claims that they are the ones you can see the the page here that i the claim that they make is
- 4:42This is a New Jersey and they boast that one of their collection developers named Linda Tripp is the person who actually came up with National Comic Book Day.
- 4:51Now, I just think that this is poorly written.
- 4:55I I the blog post was published in 2024.
- 5:00And there's no shot that National Comic Book Day was invented or or concocted in 2024 because I've been talking about National Comic Book Day.
- 5:12longer than that.
- 5:13So if she came up with the idea, which I don't think she did, she didn't come up with it in twenty twenty four when they decided wrote it right about.
- 5:21What I think this article meant to say here, we can we can be done looking at all that.
- 5:28What I think she meant to say here was that she brought the idea, it was her idea to do National Comic Book Day at the southern w whatever county
- 5:40the Somerset County Library System in New Jersey to their library system.
- 5:45Like that is what her idea was.
- 5:50My wait my bet is she did not come up with the idea for national comic books.
- 5:56The National Day Calendar Group's official statement on National Comic Book Day is that they continue to look for the source of the day.
- 6:06Sometimes I look for the source of particularly challenging bathrooms.
- 6:12Recently the answer has almost always been pizza.
- 6:15Kids, once you hit age thirty, you really have to readjust and and and realign your relationship to pizza.
- 6:26It's an it's a young man's game.
- 6:28And and in sometimes it's it is okay to hang up the boards when it comes to pizza.
- 6:36One thing online that is offered as a distinction is that National Comic Book Day exists more to recognize and celebrate comic book authors and artists, and is less focused on
- 6:49getting comic books, although it does say that is one way that you can celebrate it.
- 6:54Whereas I think free comic book day is like we want to get kids some comic books so that way they can get psyched.
- 7:01National Comic Book Day is more just being like, yeah, comic books exist.
- 7:04Aren't they super cool to like read and look at?
- 7:08So officially, this library system in New Jersey claims to take some credit for coming up with the idea, even though I don't think they did.
- 7:19I think it's like as if I came up and this bathroom podcast just
- 7:27started to say, and I published online one day that I came up with the idea of taking a shower in the dark.
- 7:33I didn't.
- 7:34I'm on record saying that I didn't even concoct that idea originally.
- 7:39That was something that I had shared with me.
- 7:42But there's like no data to falsify that.
- 7:45And like so with this library system rolls out and they publish on the internet, like, yeah, we came up with National Comic Book Day, hogwash.
- 7:51I'm calling hogwash on it.
- 7:54But like who's gonna be out there to falsify it when the National Day calendar people are like, yeah, it remains a mystery to us.
- 8:03So the origins of National Comic Book Day are an enigma.
- 8:09But I think they're rooted in the desire to highlight artists and authors.
- 8:15Today, on Privy, I wanna highlight an artist and an author and an and a comic book and a comic book character.
- 8:23And who themselves are bathroom themed, bathroom related, and I would argue bathroom enthusiasts.
- 8:37David Pilke Jr.
- 8:39was born in Cleveland, Ohio to Reverend David Pilke.
- 8:43Dave Pilkey Jr.
- 8:45attended elementary school and he had a diagnosis, or maybe not one, but later had one, I'm not sure, of ADHD and dyslexia.
- 8:56Dave Pilke got in trouble a lot as a kid because of this.
- 9:01School system was less open to try to figure out like, how do we help this kid?
- 9:07His trouble often wound him up sitting in a desk in the school hallway.
- 9:13Now, I've shared on the show that I work in a public high school.
- 9:17I work in SPED.
- 9:18It's woofy SPED out here.
- 9:19And what's interesting is you can't do this really today.
- 9:24You can ask a kid, like, hey, would you like to go work in the hallway?
- 9:27But like, you can't punitively send a kid into the hallway to sit there regularly.
- 9:33We have to make sure that kids
- 9:35That don't understand have to just sit there and keep on trying to figure it out.
- 9:39It's kind of frustrating.
- 9:41And maybe, and you try to give them the skills and the tools, but like at high school, there's a point at which where it's like, it is kind of hard to teach some of these old
- 9:48dogs some new tricks.
- 9:50And maybe Pilke would have learned more if he was in the room and not in the hallway.
- 9:55But when Dave Pilke got removed from class and was set in the hallway.
- 10:01He wasn't just sitting there twiddling thumbs, doing rubber pencil tricks and killing his time.
- 10:08As he states it, it is in the hallway where he would go and sit where he got in trouble that he created his own original comic book character, Captain Underpants.
- 10:20Now, I'm not arguing that kids should be in the hallway and that they should not be in the classroom learning.
- 10:27I don't think.
- 10:29That Pilke would have come up with and created Captain Underpants if he had not had that time to do so in the hallway of his school.
- 10:39However, while he came up with Captain Underpants by while being removed from his classroom, his first book was not Captain Underpants.
- 10:50David Pilke published his first book in 1987 at age 21.
- 10:57It was called World War One One being spelled as like we won the battle.
- 11:03See, it's clever 'cause like World War One, it's funny.
- 11:08Pilke was a student when he wrote the book.
- 11:12And it was an allegorical tale, a fable, about a nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union.
- 11:20His book won an award, which is cool, but it's definitely a different pace than Captain Underpants.
- 11:27Years later, Dave Pilke found his stride, writing kids' books in a different style.
- 11:34This, like pseudo comic book.
- 11:37Featuring an original character, Captain Underpants.
- 11:42What's interesting is it doesn't seem like Dave Pilke ever really shifted back into traditional literature after this point.
- 11:51He would go on to write a number of Captain Underprant underpants novels.
- 11:55That's what they are, they're novels.
- 11:58Graphic though they may be.
- 12:00And he's still currently putting out dogman comics.
- 12:05Also novels, I would add.
- 12:08Dogman having its start within the world of Captain Underpants.
- 12:13For those who haven't read Captain Underpants or seen the show or movie, I will summarize it for you.
- 12:22There are these two boys named Harold and George, who are undoubtedly stand ins for the childhood Dave Pilke.
- 12:32If anybody's gonna run at me and say that Harold and George are not.
- 12:37How Dave Pilke has put himself into these stories, they're a bald faced god dang liar.
- 12:42Like has to be.
- 12:45Harold and George regularly get in trouble at school and frequently are in trouble with their principal for their schemes and endeavors.
- 12:54This principal really does truly seem to be out to get them.
- 12:58Harold and George is a means of alleviating their constant trouble in school and
- 13:03To influence their teacher or their principal to do whatever they want him to do, they buy a device to hypnotize him and convince him that when he is triggered on it, he becomes a
- 13:13superhero named Captain Underpants.
- 13:18Captain Underpants, to give the description, look him up.
- 13:21We never heard of him.
- 13:22Listener, if you never heard of Captain Underpants, it's wild.
- 13:25Captain Underpants, in short, is a grown adult man, heavy set, larger fellow, who has nothing on but tidy whiteies.
- 13:33It's a tough thing to behold.
- 13:36The live action Captain Underpants would be just just baffling to see.
- 13:44Well, Captain Underp, don't ever do that.
- 13:46Do not make a live action, Captain Underpants.
- 13:48It can't just simply cannot happen.
- 13:51It must never happen.
- 13:53We have a duty as people to keep that from happening.
- 13:57I love Captain Underpants, but not live action.
- 13:59Anything but that.
- 14:00It just can't be.
- 14:02Captain Underpants doesn't have superpowers in and of himself.
- 14:07He will often drink a thing called extra strength superpower juice.
- 14:12Wherein he gains all sorts of abilities, including super strength, flight, elasticity, see his underpants, body inflation, wedgie powder, power, also see his underpants, laser
- 14:23vision, and durability, just to name a few.
- 14:25There's others, but they're kind of stupid and like they pop up in very situational things.
- 14:31And I don't really chalk them up to that.
- 14:35All I gotta say is that's gotta be some good juice Captain Underpants is sucking on.
- 14:39Like, I think it's probably Grape Ghost.
- 14:43I'm a Polar Seltzer man through and through.
- 14:45I love Polar Seltzer.
- 14:46I've said on the show multiple times how much I love polar seltzer.
- 14:49But if I'm doing energy drinks, I'm all in on two Agape Energy Drink and Ghost.
- 14:54That's it.
- 14:56But one of the mainstays of the Captain Underpants franchise and why they're talking about it.
- 15:03Today on National Comic Book Day is the potty humor that Captain Underpants stories have to offer.
- 15:12And as we'll see, not as it just potty humor, but it's potty humor woven throughout as Pilke takes on the role of Harold and George to write and draw the comic books about
- 15:22Captain Underpants and Dogman in the story itself.
- 15:25It's very meta.
- 15:27So I want to look at some of the bathroom moments from Captain Underpants before we look at the benefit and strategy.
- 15:33That these things employ.
- 15:41One of the most prominent villains in the Captain Underpants series and franchise, and it's really the first villain that you meet in the stories, is the TurboToilet 2000.
- 15:55The Turbo Toilet 2000 is a gigantic mutant talking toilet with robot arms and legs who is the leader of the talking toilets.
- 16:07Interestingly, in the movies, the
- 16:10Turbo Toilet two thousand has depi been depicted as a quote unquote smart toilet.
- 16:15See it get it.
- 16:15It's funny.
- 16:16Because he can talk and like run around and stuff.
- 16:18And so he's a smart toilet, which is similar to how we not me, but there are people in the world who have smart toilets which are just toilets that hook to Bluetooth.
- 16:27And Wi Fi maybe.
- 16:31By the end of the story, the TurboToilet 2000 is ejected to Uranus.
- 16:35Again, it's just brilliant.
- 16:38TurboToilet on Uranus could have been any planet.
- 16:41Could have been Mars, could have been Jupiter.
- 16:44But of course it gets sent to Uranus.
- 16:47TurboToilet 2000 pops back up across the Captain Underpants franchise, usually by way of making background appearance or like
- 16:56Info drops about what's going on on the surface of Uranus with TurboToylo two thousand.
- 17:00I'll tell you what.
- 17:04They should really not worry as much about what's going on on the surface of Uranus.
- 17:09The surface of Uranus is honestly, in many ways, kind of a private matter, I'm just saying.
- 17:15In the TV show for Captain Underpants, there's a bad guy named T P Mummy.
- 17:20T P Mummy is an evil villain alter ego of Mrs.
- 17:24Yeh.
- 17:25That's about the information that is offered on it.
- 17:28It's funny because the superhero name is literally what she is.
- 17:31She's a toilet paper mummy lady.
- 17:34Like when you wrap your friend up at a Halloween party, and it's like, who can wrap up the Halloween toilet paper mummy the fastest?
- 17:43And you spin it.
- 17:45Wild.
- 17:48One of my favorite villains in the Captain Underpants world is Professor Tippy Tinkletrousers, whose former name is for Professor Pippy P diarrhea steen poopy pants
- 18:01esquire.
- 18:04He's an ongoing bad guy.
- 18:06Dr.
- 18:07Pippy P Poopy Pants is an actual scientist in the story.
- 18:13He seems very capable.
- 18:14He takes a job at George and Harold's Elementary School teaching them science.
- 18:20And when they find out that their teacher's name is Professor Poopy Pants, they make fun of him so hard that he fully leans into the mad scientist.
- 18:32persona and role of things and he just goes off.
- 18:35He invents all sorts of crazy things and is arrested by story end.
- 18:41Well I'm gonna say is there's some last names that don't work if you're a school teacher.
- 18:48Doesn't matter any grade.
- 18:50Any grade in the single digits, it's not gonna work.
- 18:54When I was growing up, we had a substitute teacher whose name was Miss Gas.
- 18:59Now, that's funny enough.
- 19:02Like Miss Gas is funny because of gas, because of fart.
- 19:07But it gets better.
- 19:10Because Miss Gas had a lazy eye.
- 19:13And in our telling of the story, she had a glass eye.
- 19:17And so you can see now she was also Miss Glass.
- 19:22We added that letter to it.
- 19:24Honest mistake.
- 19:25Like, I thought it was Miss Glass.
- 19:28That's what I thought her name was.
- 19:30That's my bad.
- 19:31But like she would be looking over here and be talking to you here.
- 19:36It was crazy.
- 19:38She'd be like,
- 19:38Hunter, and she's not looking at me, and I'm like, 'Cause her other eye, the good one, the is over here.
- 19:45So it was wild.
- 19:47Very disorienting.
- 19:49So Miss Gas, Miss Glass, had a glass eye.
- 19:54But and this is where our behavior as kids went from, I would say, innocent goofs to inappropriate.
- 20:03Miss Glass, my bad, gas, was also a larger woman.
- 20:09And she, to tell the truth, carried much of her largeness in her butt of all places.
- 20:19And so many of the kids in the class nah I never did it.
- 20:24Referred to her not as Miss Gas, not as Miss Glass, but as Miss, well, yeah.
- 20:34I'm just saying.
- 20:36The principal in Captain Underpants, Captain Underpants himself, really, hired Professor Pippy Pee Poopy Pants to work with Harold and George.
- 20:47It might be on him.
- 20:48Creating this this crazy villain man.
- 20:52might actually be kind of on him just a little bit.
- 20:55Like you gotta have some you gotta have some forethought on these things, brother.
- 21:00Professor Pippy Pee Poopy Pants pops back up throughout the books with his robotic trousers featuring prominently.
- 21:08In the TV show for Captain Underpants, which I didn't even know existed until I began doing research for this show.
- 21:17In the TV show, there is a group of heroes called the Toilet Tastics.
- 21:22Toilet Tastics are a team of kind of like Avengers of the Bathroom Heroes, including Captain Underpants, Plungeria, Surgent Boxers, Colonel Yurnal, Fart Quake.
- 21:36So good.
- 21:38And the flusher.
- 21:41There's almost no real information about any of these heroes other than when they pop up from time to time in these episodes of Captain Underpants.
- 21:52But they're all alter egos of characters around George and Harold, or are George and Harold themselves.
- 21:59It's an Avengers action squad, bathroom themed.
- 22:03It's very good.
- 22:04The toilet tastic.
- 22:07My favorite hat would definitely be Fartquake.
- 22:09I think Fartquake
- 22:14If somehow
- 22:17Dave Pilke could figure out how to convince Marvel to include Fart Quake in their Marvel's magical mystical world of hybrids and monsters and all the things they have going on.
- 22:33That would just be so good.
- 22:35Just fart quake.
- 22:36Just fart quake versus ant man, fartquake versus literally anything is just funny as heck.
- 22:46But these fight against a evil bathroom themed group calling called the poopetrators.
- 22:56See you see, it's like the perpetrators, but it's poop you see.
- 23:04Poopetrators are made up of poopacabra, nice, TP Mummy, who we've already discussed, Colonita.
- 23:16Smartsey Farty and Camo Flush.
- 23:21Poopacabra is also known as Rat Trick and is just a mutated mouse.
- 23:25Smartsy fartsy is just a scientific fart cloud, a sentient fart cloud.
- 23:31These are the characters.
- 23:33There's plenty of potty humor spread throughout the book, which brings us to our final perspective on Captain Underpants, its comedic use and clever use of potty humor.
- 23:47Now, due to these things, its use of potty humor, Captain Underpants has drummed up plenty of controversy over the years.
- 23:57While it's clearly a children's book, there has been campaigns and calls for the Captain Underpants books to be removed from libraries.
- 24:10The American Library Association listed Captain Underpants as the most challenged book.
- 24:19Between 2012 and 2013.
- 24:23The chief reason in all these is the use of potty humor, bathroom talk, poop related conversations, and just the way the books mention and talk about what they deemed to be
- 24:37obscene.
- 24:38And I'm here to tell you that that's stupid.
- 24:40I've done and discussed way more obscene things on this show.
- 24:46And no one's trying to cancel me.
- 24:47Actually, they have.
- 24:49But you just keep going.
- 24:51Dave Pilke's response to this dumb outburst is great.
- 24:57Dave actually defends his choice to include potty humor, which respect, and harkens back to his days as a kid.
- 25:08He's jotting down notes for his Captain Underpants character.
- 25:14And that's the stuff that he found funny.
- 25:20He says, well, it does include bathroom humor.
- 25:23It does not have much violence or obscenity or language.
- 25:29It's mild potty humor.
- 25:32He noted it's to make reading more accessible to young readers, primarily, even I would say, just to say the truth, young boys who may not be as hot on the idea of reading.
- 25:44Having these jokes, some bathroom jokes, helps people connect to the story.
- 25:51It helps.
- 25:52Young readers, especially boys, engage with it in a way that is fun.
- 25:58Not usually how a young boy would interact with reading.
- 26:03And that's the beauty of a good bathroom gag and fart joke.
- 26:07It is funny.
- 26:09Everybody does it, so somebody ought to make something out of it.
- 26:14In fact, Dave Pilke has said in interviews that he remembers back when he was a kid.
- 26:21And the thing that got people howling when he would goof around, more so than anything else, was a good fart joke or some well-timed potty humor.
- 26:34If second grade Dave Pilke enjoyed it, so would countless other kids.
- 26:39To then, to that end, another genius thing that Captain Underpants, Dave Pilke, by extension, does is Pilke takes on a pseudonym within the stories, playing the role of his
- 26:52grade school self by having the characters George and Harold write the Captain Underpants comics in the Captain Underpants books.
- 27:03Doing this, it causes kids to feel not only like the stories are written for them, but that they are to an extent written by them.
- 27:15Pilky has said in interviews that he feels like there's a bunch of bathroom talk with little kids, right up to the point where those kids figure out how to use a toilet.
- 27:25And then, like, society tells kids that you just can't talk about bathrooms and poop anymore.
- 27:31They just make it taboo.
- 27:33And I'm not saying the kids should run around with constant fart jokes and burping at the table, but like bathroom life is a super normal thing.
- 27:44And a lot of what goes on in here is hilarious.
- 27:50Especially when it is emphasized and it is in an unexpected context.
- 27:56In fact, I think the the attempt to make bathroom talk taboo is what has made it even funnier.
- 28:05If you tell kids over and over and over that if you fart around other people or that if you fart in public, that it's bad and gross and
- 28:14And it's rude and people shouldn't do it.
- 28:17And if you do it, you should be quiet or should excuse yourself.
- 28:20And then some kid just rips the nastiest, thickest, grimiest, most stank-filled, Taco Bell-ridden, pants-shaking, chair busting, butt ripper heard by the masses.
- 28:39It's funny.
- 28:42And so there's this huge value in Captain Underpants books.
- 28:49I would argue the value is not despite the potty humor, but the value of Captain Underpants is due to the potty humor.
- 28:59Because while there are a lot of young readers showing up for the potty humor and the mildly crashed jokes, what they find in Captain Underpants and in in Dogman.
- 29:11are actually some pretty thoughtful stories about creativity and kindness.
- 29:18Heck, I've even seen my son take to trying to make comic books from time to time, undoubtedly because of his love for these books.
- 29:29And so, this National Comic Book Day.
- 29:34While the Captain Underpants books are not traditional comic books, they have them inside of them.
- 29:41And in the spirit of national comic books, it that spirit is captured in Captain Underpants, who is one of the chief bathroom related superheroes with some of the best
- 29:54bathroom related supervillains.
- 30:03Thank you all so much for listening to the show.
- 30:06As always, we'd ask you to leave a rating and review.
- 30:09The five-star options are preferred.
- 30:10You can do that on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Podcast.
- 30:13And when you do, we'll donate some money, usually about a dollar to Wounded Warriors and Living Water International, as a reminder to keep pooping in the free world.
- 30:22This free world was not always free.
- 30:23And in pursuit of cleaner water for all.
- 30:25Not everybody has it, but everybody should.
- 30:28Visit us online, privy-cast dot com.
- 30:31We got a shop.
- 30:32Go check that out.
- 30:33You can send me an email, privycast at gmail.com.
- 30:36We'd love to hear from you.
- 30:37Episode suggestions, ideas, feedback, concerns if you want to be on the show.
- 30:40What have you?
- 30:41Reach out.
- 30:42We'd love to hear from you.
- 30:43We would also like you to follow us on social media at Privycast.
- 30:47You can follow me.
- 30:48I'm at Owl at seven.
- 30:49Thanks to Kevin and Poddington and any others whose music you we use, you can find it in the description down below.
- 30:56This brings us to the end of another episode of Privy.
- 30:59Keep pooping in the free world.
- 31:00Own your stink.
- 31:02Go read a comic book.
- 31:03or a Captain Underpants book.
- 31:05And now, as always, don't forget to flush.