Customer Reviews

Captain Underpants And The Big, Bad Battle Of The Bionic Booger Boy, Part 1: The Night Of The Nasty Nostril Nuggets (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition) (Captain Underpants (Pb))

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

My son has been reading this series from the beginning and even though he is beyond this reading level he loves these books just as much as he ever did! I like to let him read things just of the fun of it and he sure thought this book was fun...with a capital *F*...

He wanted to read the book out loud to me so I was able to get the full effects of the *nasty nostril nugget* theme... I hadn't heard him laugh out loud so much, in a long long time. It was very nice to see.

The book is set up like the others in that george and harold write cartoons through out and my son just loves the cartoons. The main characters were all included although some of them were a bit different than in prior books. Some of them also had more or less involvement in this book.

I think this book was very heavy on the whole *nostil nugget/mucus/gross out theme. At times it was a bit much for me but for him...it was total and complete enjoyment. He was roaring with laughter the entire time.

There are so many books that are hard or painful for him to read in school. So many books he is required to read that are either a challenge or quite sad... I think it's important that he read books like this to remember the simple joy of reading... and this book, for him, was joy.

We had a great time reading Dav's new book. No other kids book author makes my kids laugh so often. I'm sure we'll be hearing from humor-challenged people about the booger and related jokes. I can't wait to chuckle at the "shame on Scholastic" and "this is SO inappropriate" blah blah blah fest. Say what you want--Dav's books are the only books my kids will pass on TV and video games to read. Thanks for all the belly laughs laughs Dav!

First, specifically regarding The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets: Our whole family loves Captain Underpants stories, and we were afraid no more were being written, so it was great to discover the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, and realize we'd get to read a part 2 later on. This book tells a typically outrageous story of the boys' good intentions gone awry, when a silly nerdy character named Melvin (hey, not disparaging nerds, been called one often) accidentally turns himself into a pretty icky monster, and the usual twists and turns occur, leading to a cliffhanger that is resolved in Part 2, The Revenge of the Ridiculous Robo-Boogers.

The whole Captain Underpants series is wonderful. I was happy to discover it a couple of years ago, as my son was a very good reader, but completely uninterested in books. This series changed that completely. And I appreciate the gentle pokes at sexist principals, well-meaning but myopic school librarians and slightly suspicious cafeteria ladies; just a few of the personal memories that led me to homeschool my own children. George and Harold get into all kinds of trouble, but they really are kinda warm and sweet, especially as you get to know them throughout the whole series. Anyone who sees these funny, well-thought-out books as negative or subversive is really not getting the message at all.

Melvin Sneedly looks too much like some character in the SpongeBob episode "I'm your biggest fan." If Melvin Sneedly were a Hamtaro caracter, he would be Dexter.
Facts
Underwear Day is on August 8. Piqua, Ohio is where the Captain Underpants series takes place. George lives at 1526 Vine Street. George Beard and Harold Hutchins got their names from children's book characters that Dav Pilkey liked as a kid: "Georgie the Ghost", and "Harold and the Purple Crayon". Their last names (Beard and Hutchins) were the last names of Dav's two favorite "Little Rascals" characters: "Stimey (Matthew Beard)" and "Wheezer (Bobby Hutchins)". George and Harold's school, Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, got its name from "Curly" of "The Three Stooges". Curly's given name was Jerome Horwitz. Dav Pilkey chose Piqua because they have an "Underwear Festival" there every year. Sadly, most of Dav's childhood comic books no longer exist. Many were ripped up by his teachers, and others were "borrowed" by his friends. Dav's friends would take the comics home and lose them, or bring them back weeks later with pages missing. The only comics that Dav still has are the ones he made for his parents in the mid 1970's. Dav's parents didn't care for potty humor, so he wrote about three "non-offensive" super heroes called "Water Man", "Molecule Man" and "Mr. Shape-O". Watch for these guys to re-appear as very offensive villains in future "Super Diaper Baby" books. You might notice a theme in George and Harold's comic books: the gym teacher always gets attacked by the villains, but nobody seems to care. This theme reoccurs because many of Dav Pilkey's former gym teachers were REALLY, REALLY MEAN to him. So let this be a lesson to gym teachers all over the world: be nice to your students, or some day they might grow up and get revenge by making fun of you in their epic novels! Dav Pilkey has never actually given or received a "wedgie". Dav was called Dave until he got a job at Pizza Hut at age 15 because the typewriter ran out of E's. The name stuck with Dav.
The creation of Melvin Sneedly
Melvin Sneedly, the villain in this book, was actually based on somebody Dav knew in sixth grade. The kid Dave knew, Michael Sneedman, wasn't nearly as evil as Melvin, but he was annoying. All the students knew that Michael was smarter than anybody else in the class. Worst of all, he took every opportunity he could find to point that out to everyone and rub their noses in it. Michael had the infuriating habit of finishing all his tests and worksheets before everybody else. Then he'd open his desk, take out a red pen, and GRADE HIS OWN PAPERS! He'd go through all of his answers, make sure they were all correct, then award himself a giant "A+" at the top. He even went so far as to make smiley faces on his papers and write "Another Fantastic Job!" or "Keep up the GREAT work, Michael!" Here's how Dave got him back: After Christmas break, their teacher came up with a dumb idea to help make them all more competitive and aggressive. It was a system of keeping track of our academic achievements and "good deeds." For two weeks, they all brought in those little, flat plastic clips you find on the ends of loaves of bread. When their finally had enough, their teacher took them all home and spray painted them different colors. The next day, he brought in a large wooden board with all of our names printed on it. Directly under each kid's name was a nail. The object of this system was that every time you got an "A" or did a "good deed", you'd get a white bread clip (worth 1 point) to hang on the nail under your name. If you got five white bread clips, you could trade them in for a green bread clip (which was worth five points). Then there were yellow, blue, and red bread clips that were worth 10, 20, 50 points respectively. The granddaddy of all bread clips was the golden bread clip, which was worth 100 points. On an average day, an average kid could maybe expect to earn three or four white bread clips. Dave usually got one or two. But Michael Sneedman was obsessed. He wasn't happy unless he had earned at least a yellow clip every day. Some days he earned as much as 15 bread clips, and Dav distinctly remembers him earning a blue clip one day. After a while, the bread clip board started to become a great source of rivalry in the classroom. Kids were doing good deeds deliberately so they could get a new bread clip. They were asking for extra-credit homework so they could get even MORE bread clips. Things were getting too aggressive for Dave's tastes, but almost everybody else seemed to enjoy the competition. Everyone had sworn to be honest about the whole bread clip board thing, and they were all pretty honest (even Dave). But Dave knew there had to be a loophole somewhere. He had sworn to be honest when giving himself bread clips, and had sworn to be honest about not switching anybody else's bread clips around... but nobody said anything about not tipping the board over. One day during recess, it was too cold to go outside, so the students had recess indoors. Everybody was hanging around talking while Dave quietly made his way over to the bread clip board. He scoped out the area very carefully, just to make sure nobody was watching. Then with a flick of my finger, he nudged the bread clip board away from the wall upon which it was leaning. The board began to tip forward. Quickly (but not too quickly) He walked away from the board as it began falling to the floor. Dave had gotten about two and a half steps away when a giant CRASH! filled the classroom air. Everything stopped. The kids turned to see what had happened. Dave looked as surprised as he could. It couldn't have been more perfect. The bread clip board was face down on the floor. Bread clips were scattered everywhere. What had once been an intricate accounting of our grandiose moral and academic achievements had suddenly been reduced to a board with nails on it, surrounded by a bunch of little colored bread clips. "Oh, NO!" Dave shouted, "Look what just happened all by itself, accidentally, with no outside interference from anyone!" Half of the kids in the class cheered. Some kids seemed annoyed. Michael was mortified. His dreams of annihilating his peers had been crushed. His A's and "good deeds" were for naught. He dashed over to the board and lifted it up. But alas, every one of the bread clips had fallen off. "I REMEMBER," Michael shouted, "I had 344 points!" He leaned the board back up against the wall and began frantically replacing his clips. But unfortunately for Michael, nobody else had memorized their exact number of bread clips at that moment. We could only speculate. "I think I had four gold ones," Dave said. "Me too," said another kid. "I had seven!" said somebody else. "NO YOU DIDN'T!!!" screamed Michael, his eyes welling up with tears. "I WAS THE WINNER!!! I BEAT ALL OF YOU!!! NOBODY EVEN CAME CLOSE TO MY SCORE!!! I HATE YOU ALL!!!" Over the next few days, Michael tried his best to "right" the terrible wrong which had befallen him. He put himself in charge of redistributing the bread clips, but nobody was happy with his decisions. Soon kids began taking it upon themselves to arrange the bread clips to suit their own likings, and before long, chaos broke out. Kids were arguing and fighting so much that within a week, the teacher took the bread clip board outside and he tossed it in the dumpster. And that was it. It was over. Kids stopped doing good deeds, and gave up on trying to get "A's." Everybody calmed down and returned to normal except for Michael. Michael was so distraught over the whole incident, that he accidentally missed a mistake while grading one of his own quizzes. He put his usual "A+," and "100%" on the top of the paper, but when he got it back the next day, the "A+" had been crossed out and changed to an "A." The "100%" had been crossed out and changed to a "96%." Michael had made a mistake. Michael was in shock. Michael was devastated. It was the proudest moment of Dav's life, but the worst for Michael. Dav isn't sure what happened to Michael Sneedman. Perhaps he's still sitting at that very same desk, staring in disbelief at his "A", and wondering where it all went so terribly, terribly wrong. Thinking back on it, Dav feels bad that his one small act of defiance sparked such moral and academic anarchy in our classroom. But then Dav thinks about that 96%, and he feels it was all worth it!
About the book
Dave Pilkey has never admitted to knocking over the bread clip board until just now. As long as Dave comes clean, he also broke the test tubes in his fifth grade classroom by the sink in 1977. One of the Robo-Boogers, Carl, didn't originally have lots of little gross hairs sticking out of him. That happened by accident one day when Dav blew some eraser shavings off of his drawing table. The shavings landed on an early sketch of Carl. When he picked up the sketch, Dav thought it looked grossly funny. The eraser shavings made Carl look like he was covered with a bunch of shimmering nose hairs. So from that moment on, Dav always drew Carl with lots of gross hairs sticking out of his body. That's what artists sometimes call a "happy accident." The four Flip-O-Rama titles in this book are actually parodies of song titles. The songs are "Thanks for the Memories" by Bob Hope, "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" by B.J. Thomas, "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I Got Love in my Tummy" by the Ohio Express and "A Hard Day's Night" by the Beatles. Pages 165 and 167 of this book can be flipped to produce a "Flip-O-Rama" effect. It works pretty well, even though it wasn't designed for this effect. Dav didn't realize this until after he painted the pages. To make it work, flip only page 165. Be sure you can see the images on pages 165 and 167 when you flip. The whenhamstersattack.com website mentioned on page 37 really does exist. In case you're wondering why Sulu seems to get bigger and smaller sometimes (p. 143 and 144), it's because of the highly unstable nature of Flexo-Growmonic Steel, which is a seldom-used alloy compound with the ability to flex and grow when affected by positive or negative ions and/or currents. Scientists do agree that if Flexo-Growmonic steel were somehow fused with living mammal tissues at a cellular level, the normal electrical currents of a warm-blooded creature would be enough to trigger a flexing and/or growing reaction. Many scientists feel that the steel might flex and grow exponentially during times of great stress, and therefore it can be concluded that this book is entirely scientifically accurate. Super Diaper Baby and Diaper Dog are hidden in this book twice. Can you find them?
Summary
In this epic tale, George and Harold must save the day once again when a messy prank sets off a chain-reaction which could ultimately enslave all of humankind. Watch for Melvin Sneedly from Attack of the Talking Toilets to return as the nerdy super-genius whose hunger for for vengeance gets him into a snotty situation!
Pop Rocks & Coke
The experiment that Melvin's parents are doing on page 72 is actually an old urban legend that was quite popular when Dave was a kid. The legend warned children that they should never mix Pop-Rocks with Coke because it could make them blow up. Green Day sang a song called Pop Rocks and Coke. The Pop-Rocks and Coke story is not true. It really won't make you blow up. It will, however, cause you to burst into flames. A kid ate 6 bags of pop rocks at a party. He then proceeded to drink a 6-pack of Pepsi. The two substances combined in his stomach and exploded, killing him horribly. That's why pop rocks were taken off the market in the early eighties. The candy was invented in 1956 by General Foods research scientist William A. Mitchell and introduced to the general public in 1975, these fruit-flavored nuggets delighted kids with their fizzle. Small amounts of carbonation were released when the candy was placed in the mouth, causing both a mild exploding sensation and resulting in a satisfying sizzling noise kids loved. Though the confection had been extensively tested and found safe, the combustive candy still alarmed residents in Seattle. The Food and Drug Administration set up a telephone hotline there to assure anxious parents that the fizzing candy would not cause children to choke. Nevertheless, among kids, wild stories about the perils of eating Pop Rocks abounded. Mixing the candy with carbonated drinks would cause the stomach to explode because of too much carbon dioxide. One rumor said that an overly-cute kid who achieved fame in LIFE cereal commercials had died of this. Urban legends require victims who are known yet anonymous, the ubiquitous friends of a friend, to lend them a touch of credible realism without allowing for the easy verification of their details. Little Mikey was a kid known to other children by virtue of his famous television commercial, yet he was still relatively anonymous. Few people knew his real name, and his non-appearance in any public role subsequent to his well known LIFE commercial could therefore plausibly be attributed to his untimely demise. John Gilchrist, who played Mikey in the old commercial, survived childhood unexploded. He now manages advertising and accounts for a New York radio station.

I just bought this for my son today. The title was especially appealing to him (I think if you just say "booger" it'll crack him up). I sent him in for his required 20 minutes of reading time, and I had to check on him a couple of times to make sure he was actually reading he was laughing so hard. He continued to read after his time was up, until he finished the book. I think that says it all... he enjoyed it so much that he wanted to finish it. Highly recommended.

This is the best book ever. I also own part 2. I own #1,3,,and 5. I can't wait for the next book. You can find more Dav Pilkey books like Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot. Let's get back to the book.This book is funny. I like the Flip-o-rama in this book.After I get all the books I am going to read them again.After I read all the books I'm going to start reading Ricky Ricotta's Mighty Robot.I am going to get the collection of the books. We'll I hope they are good.

Will Captain Underpants win or will the Bionic Booger Boy? Captain Underpants is strong but he is not wise. Will he win? Find out in the book!
Will you learn who Bionic Booger Boy is? I recommend you read it. It is a cool book!

This was the book with whom I laught the most. It's so nauseauting that you hardly can eat right after. I had to read it in fragments because I just couldn't laught more about the ideas in this book. I realy recomend it for any one who likes children books and have a good time as a child.

This was actually one of the first Captain Underpants books I have gotten for my seven year old. He read over half of the book before we got home from the store and read the rest of it before bedtime! We have never had to fight him to read but to turn off the game system and television yes. This one was a hands down all out best buy!

My son Ethan, has never laughed out loud and frequently when reading books, until this one. He has been begging me for more books in the series! I am so happy I gave in to the whole "booger" theme and let him read them....after all body functions and boogers are the fun in a seven year old boy's life around here!!!

This about the school brainiac (Melvin) turning himself into a bionic booger boy. Now see what happened was he tried fusing himself with his bionic robot by using his new invention (The Combine-O-Tron). But righ before the invention was about to do its thing ,Melvin sneezed at the last second. So the invention fused the robot,Melvin, and the snot that came out his nose. In the first book, this used to be about two kids named George and Harold who made an underwear hero out of their principal by using something called the 3-D hypno ring so remember everithing I just said.