Subject: Captian Underpants!?
Author:
Posted on: 2016-07-03 17:55:00 UTC
I remember that! I was in Grade 3 when I read The Plight of The Purple Potty People. I had to wait until I graduated to read the next instalment. To be honest, I liked the ones where everything would go back to status quo in the end more. When I was four, I was in China, drawing Thomas The Tank Engine characters. I ended up getting them published in a magazine.
I'm visiting my parents over the weekend, and I found that they had kept some things from when I was 4. I noticed a few sheets of paper bound with string, and it turned out to be a Pokémon fanfic based on generation 1. Between the writing having faded and the horrible writing (in more than one sense) there's portion of it that I can't actually understand, but I do still remember the basic plot. The fic's title appears to be, in true generation 1 style, a sequence of glitched out characters (I can't read it and can't remember), starring a character whose name is a different sequence of glitch characters. She does not have a word of description in the entire fic.
There are 3 chapters to it. The first has Articuno land in front of the protagonist and tell her that "three is bad stuff in the volcana" [sic]. She then rides Articuno to a volcano and fight Moltres while still on Articuno's back. Using the help of her Bulbasaur, she captures Moltres. Chapter 2 is basically the same, but with Zapdos doing the unspecified bad stuff in a power plant. Chapter 3 is the epic conclusion, in which true culprit is revealed to be 'M (some friends had shown me the old man glitch, and I tried it out), so the protagonist flies on Articuno with the other two legendary birds following her to Cinnabar Island for the ultimate showdown! After a drawn out, 5 sentence fight, everything seems hopeless, but then the protagonist throws a master ball (presumably from the 6th slot in her bag) and successfully catches the glitch. "THE END".
I'm probably not going to be posting it online because it would be hard to replicate some of the more unusual writing errors on the paper, and because I do not want to spawn a mini-MissingNo. horde. I do still find it funny that I actually found this fic, and that I was able to write a 3 chapter suefic at age 4. It's also a humorous contrast to some of my writing from high school, which contained prose that was both beige and urple at the same time and stretched English grammar as far as possible without breaking it. It's fun to take a trip down memory lane occasionally.
Suefic or not, that's pretty impressive. All I did at four was draw and maybe write one or two words on the bottom.
I bloody loved Captain Underpants when I was smaller.
One day, I decided: 'Aw, mate, I can bloody do that. Dav Pikley's nothing on me, he can't even spell his first name!'*
It was some nonsense involving the two main characters, Jim and Jon, (both of whom looked and acted suspiciously similarly to the two main characters from Captain Underpants) becoming spies.
I originally killed one of their dads off to toss them into spyhood, but later decided to make it a simple kidnapping.
Can't remember if I ever drew his corpse, or anything like that, but, by God, I hope I did, because that's comedy gold, right there.
They followed the perpetrator of the kidnapping/murder, snuck through some back-alley, and never continued their journey, because I gave up. Never wrote again until I was a teenager.
Poor buggers are probably still shivering in those streets to this day.
Good Lord, though. Three chapters. At four.
I was barely sapient when I was four!
*Fact: Larfen J. Stocke, esq actually thought like this, as a child. Those exact words went through his little head.
Mini-talking toilet? I guess we don't get to name them until someone missions a fic from one of his books, and I can't imagine anyone wanting to do that -- his are continua where weapons involving boogers don't break canon. (The Ricky Ricotta series wasn't so dangerous/gross, but did anyone like those?)
I've spent my entire life up to this point convinced that it was Pikley.
Shows how much of a fan I was, eh?
Never read Ricky Ricotta. Is it any good?
I remember Captain Underpants, past all the toilet jokes and booger-weapons, having some pretty good humour. The sort that uses proper irony, and all that kind of stuff.
So many names I somehow misread... Sometimes I get scared someone's going to haul me off to an OFU. I've started triple-checking everything.
Ricky Ricotta was too formulaic to be enjoyable even when I was in second grade. Captain Underpants, though, was some great stuff.
--Key
I really want to learn more about all the people who wanted to ban the books for 'offensive content' and 'inappropriate language.'
Hear their thoughts and reasoning behind it, and their ideas for what kids that age ought to be reading.
Those books were certainly appropriate for me, considering that I'd never have ended up reading 1984 or Slaughterhouse-Five if I'd been forced to start with 'Jimmy Rabbit Does His Laundry Without Even Being Asked.'
Which is ironic, considering that 1984 and Slaughterhouse-Five are exactly the type of books they'd think people my age ought to be reading, because they're old and written by dead people, and smart people in magazines say that they're good.
I suppose some people just want to live the stereotype, eh?
I remember that! I was in Grade 3 when I read The Plight of The Purple Potty People. I had to wait until I graduated to read the next instalment. To be honest, I liked the ones where everything would go back to status quo in the end more. When I was four, I was in China, drawing Thomas The Tank Engine characters. I ended up getting them published in a magazine.
I recall it getting sort of weird in the later books.
Especially when there's up to three of the same person existing at the same time, you get moments where you have Tippy Tinkeltrousers, Slightly Younger Tippy, and Slightly Slightly Younger Tippy. I don't even want to talk about the fact that George and Harold are now actually SPOILERS that have SPOILERS so that they can go around SPOILERS without anyone asking questions. That is a far cry from two kids in a tree house, with a 3-D Hypno Ring.
On another note, I can't believe he lost the domain name of whenhamstersattack.org. That was a hilarious website.
I wonder how a volcana is different from a volcano . . . Has DOGA ever had to blow up a volcano before?
—doctorlit wrote a Goosebumps fanfiction around age eight that was far worse, rest assured
If you have access to a scanner, you could upload the fic in question into a PDF format. This would preserve any and all "glitchy" script and writing errors.
Honestly, four-year-old-you should be proud. I'm pretty sure I didn't have the capacity to even play video games when I was 4. And I hated writing.
Just don't put the three in the volcana, or you will get bad stuff.