A glowing spaceship has landed on the roof of Jerome Horwitz Elementary School. Three evil alien spacemen (named Zorx, Klax, and Jennifer) plan to take over the Earth using schoolchildren as their zombie nerd henchmen. This looks like a job for Captain Underpants!

Although this book deals with the evils of cafeteria food, Dav Pilkey never ate the stuff as a kid. He went to small parochial schools which didn't have school lunch programs. So Dav and his friends were brown-baggin' it every day (actually, Dav carried his lunch in a super-cool "Planet of the Apes" metal lunchbox). Dav didn't get his first taste of cafeteria food until he became an writer and began doing author visits at elementary schools. The teachers would usually invite Dav out to a restaurant for lunch, but Dav always preferred to eat with the kids (note: eating with teachers is boring). Unfortunately, this meant that Dav had to eat cafeteria food. "I noticed a common element at all of the cafeterias I went to. Sometimes the food tasted o.k, other times it was pretty nasty, but it always smelled the same. It all had this weird 'cafeteria food smell' (kind of a combination of hamburger grease, diapers and musty beach towels, with just a slight whiff of burned plastic... you all know the smell I'm talking about, right?). I began to wonder what made the food smell that way. Why doesn't food at an all-you-can-eat buffet-style restaurant smell that way? It's basically the same stuff, right? So I began to think that cafeteria food might be some sort of alien plot to control the brains of children" — Dav Pilkey This weird train of thought was the inspiration that led Dav to write the third Captain Underpants book. "Every book I write usually starts out with a silly thought like that. I just think about strange ideas or wild conspiracies, and eventually they grow into stories. The physical act of 'writing' each Captain Underpants book doesn't really take very long (usually two weeks or so), but the stories often take months (or even years) to think up. Right now I'm 'thinking up' the next four or five Captain Underpants stories. I do most of this thinking when I'm walking my dog in the park. She's thinking about what dog has just peed on her favorite tree, and I'm wondering how I can get Mr. Fyde's soul transferred into the Diabolical Diaper Kong, without ailienating every other grown-up south of the Bible Belt." — Dav Pilkey

1. The first four printings of this book have a mistake on the back cover. It says "24½ Chapters... 100% More Wedgie Power". Of course, there are really 25½ chapters in this book. Nobody at Scholastic (including Dav) caught the mistake before the book went to press (we're not very good at math). If you have one of the early editions with the misprint on the back cover, hang onto it — it might be very valuable some day! 2. Even MORE valuable and rarer still are copies of the first two printings of the paperback. These editions contained a MAJOR printing error. They were printed with an ENTIRE PAGE OF TEXT MISSING. Fortunately, the picture on this page was very descriptive, and nobody noticed that there was anything wrong... except for Dav! Now everybody get out your copy of the book and turn to page 97. If you don't see any words at the top of the page, CONGRATULATIONS! You have a very VERY rare book in your hands! Start screaming and jumping up and down right now! 3. Xleqxisfp Trees are over 700 feet tall and smell like raisin bread (though they taste kinda like chicken). 4. Don't feel too bad about the three cafeteria ladies who quit their jobs in this book. They'll be back some day ... and they'll be looking for REVENGE! 5. Dav no longer thinks that cafeteria is an alien conspiracy to control the minds of children. Now he thinks it's a government conspiracy.

• Rescue Raider 4000 • Bounce-O-Rama 2000 • Splashernator 2000 • Matchinator 4000 • Pilkeymon's Paintbox • Dav Pilkey's Puzzles o' Plenty Click here for pictures you can print out and color! • Difficult Schmifficult