Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Dav Pilkey, the creator of Captain Underpants. A lot of people ask me how I got the idea for Captain Underpants. Actually, I got the idea when I was about eight years old. I was in the second grade one day when my teacher said the word 'underpants' in class and everybody started laughing.

My teacher got really mad and she said, "Boys and girls, underwear is not funny!" And of course, we all laughed even harder. It was at that moment that I discovered that underwear is a really powerful thing and I wanted to figure out a way to capitalize on all that power. So I started drawing pictures of this chubby guy with a cape and a giant pair of underwear and I named him Captain Underpants.

Captain Underpants was a big hit with everybody in my class. Not such a big hit with my teacher, though. I used to draw all these pictures of him fighting robots and monsters and my teacher would get really mad and she'd kick me out of class and she'd make me go stand out in the hallway. I was the only kid in the whole school with my own personal desk out in the hall and I used to keep it stocked full of pencils and papers. Whenever I'd get sent out there I'd draw and make up stories about Captain Underpants. Pretty soon, I was making my own comic books. The comics I made were a lot like the comic books that George and Harold make in the Captain Underpants adventures. I remember that the kids in my class loved reading my Captain Underpants comics, but my teacher hated them. She used to take them and rip them up right in front of me and she'd tell me I needed to straighten up because I couldn't spend the rest of my life making silly books.

Fortunately, I wasn't a very good listener. So one day in 1996, I sat down and wrote the very first Captain Underpants book. I wanted the story to reflect my life as a kid, so I focused the story on two children named George and Harold. George and Harold are both based on me when I was a kid and they have a lot of the same problems that I had. They're very silly and they're hyper active. They make their own comic books and they aren't very popular with their teachers. But even though George and Harold get into lots of trouble, they're both actually very good kids. I really wanted George and Harold to be shining examples to every kid who just doesn't seem to fit in.