Is Captain Underpants from Piqua Ohio?

TIL that the Captain Underpants books and movie take place in Piqua, OH from Ohio

Piqua is a city located in Ohio. It is where almost every installment in the Captain Underpants franchise takes place.

The popular Captain Underpants book series is set in the very real city of Piqua, Ohio, due to Piqua’s history of underwear manufacturing and its discontinued Underwear Festival. But does author Dav Pilkey do Piqua justice in his series, or was the city chosen as a clever reference and nothing more? Having grown up in Piqua and binge-read all 12 epic novels in the Captain Underpants saga, I am ready to judge if the Piqua the waistband warrior occupies is the same Piqua I know and love. 

The majority of Captain Underpants takes place within Jerome Horwitz Elementary School. While Jerome Horwitz does not exist in Piqua, the series states that the main characters, George and Harold, live five blocks from the school on Vine Street. Vine Street is a real location, and back in 1997 when Captain Underpants debuted, four short blocks away rested Wilder Elementary School, which taught fourth graders like George and Harold. 

Wilder is not a perfect match for Jerome Horwitz, though. The school taught grades 4-6 instead of K-6 as Jerome Horwitz does, and book four states that there were “nearly a thousand” students attending the fictional school, which is more than Wilder’s 800 student capacity.

Moving beyond school buildings, book three shows schoolchildren boarding “Miami County” buses to go to the Piqua Pizza Palace, a Chuck E. Cheese-style eatery. While the restaurant is fictional, Piqua is indeed part of Miami County. Pilkey also correctly places Piqua in the Midwest when Professor Poopypants reads a newspaper ad stating “Midwestern Elementary School Seeks Science Teacher” in book four. 

Book seven has George and Harold create a comic titled Captain Underpants and the War of the Willey Wonder Nerd, which features a nuclear power plant. Clearly, the boys were inspired by Piqua’s own shuttered nuclear power facility that operated in the '60s. Piqua’s Franz Pond is also featured in book 12, when the evil gym teacher Mr. Meaner sets up his lab in an abandoned factory near the fishing spot. 

When the boys are locked in the Piqua Juvenile Detention Center after being falsely accused of robbing a bank in book nine, they are overjoyed that the institution has art and music teachers. While there are no juvenile detention centers in Piqua, the closest I could find was the West Central Juvenile Detention Center that accepts students across the Miami valley — Piqua included. Its website boasted having various community leaders and motivational speakers, but art and music teachers were not specified. 

Regrettably, there is no real-world equivalent to the Piqua Order of Professional Space and Interplanetary Explorers, or POOPSIE, that appears in the series. Also, many backdrops of downtown Piqua throughout the books show the city with skyscrapers and other tall buildings, when most of Piqua is made up of average-sized houses and businesses.

Finally, when George and Harold visit the future in book 12, they discover that their adult selves live in a neighborhood called Echo Hills. In reality, Piqua’s Echo Hills is merely a golf course. When the boys return to the present, though, Echo Hills is devoid of housing and an “empty hilltop,” as one would expect a golf course to be. If the real-world Echo Hills is ever converted into a neighborhood, Pilkey will have predicted the future. 

Despite taking certain artistic liberties, “Captain Underpants” does a fine job at referencing real locations in Piqua, and it’s pretty cool that Pilkey took the time to look up real locations to place such zany characters in. If I ever wake up and see giant toilets rampaging across the city, rest assured I’ll be prepared.  

Charlene Pepiot is a senior studying English at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Want to talk more about it? Let Charlene know by emailing her, .

“They are extremely popular books,” she said. “I don’t know if the fact that Piqua is in the book grabs them as much as the titles.”

Pilkey, now 51, recently told CBS “Sunday Morning” that he first dreamed up Captain Underpants in second grade.

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His classmates love it, but his second-grade teacher threw a fit.

Pilkey said he was encouraged to write children’s books by a college professor.

About 80 million Captain Underpants books are in print. The first was published 20 years ago.

There is "Captain Underpants and the Tyrannical Retaliation of the Turbo Toilet 2000;" "Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman,"  "Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants;" and so on and so on.

You get the point.

The books featuring fourth-graders George Beard and Harold Hutchins are far from Shakespeare, but that's OK.

If it gets them to read, that’s the best part,” Spillane, a 41-year library employee, said. “We are happy to get them for them.”

The computer-animated film "Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie" was released in 2017.

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There is not much of the real Piqua in the book, Spillane said, noting that that actual Great Outdoor Underwear Festival was a pretty big deal.

“They had a parade, the booths and the food,” she recalled.

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WHY WOULD PIQUA HAVE AN UNDERWEAR FESTIVAL? 

The festival celebrated  Piqua’s once  booming underwear manufacturing business.

From a 1997 Dayton Daily News article:

The city’s last underwear factory left Piqua in 1993.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED AT THE UNDERWEAR FESTIVAL?  
Revelers  wore red longjohns and multicolored boxer shorts during the two-day, family-friendly festival.

It included the auctioning of celebrity underwear belonging to Bill Clinton, Lucille Ball, Whoopi Goldberg, George Bush and others.

Officials modeled underwear and people battled it out in something called the "Drop Seat Trot" 5K run completed in Joe Boxers.

There was music, bed races, lip sync battles, pie eating contests and “Undy 500” midget car races, according to Dayton Daily News articles.

A 20-foot-tall pair of bright red longjohns situated in the heart of it all at the entrance to Piqua's historic Orr-Statler Block was not to be ignored, according to one article.

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WHY DID THE UNDERWEAR FESTIVAL END?

The festival that drew a crowd of 10,000 to 12,000 people annually started in 1988 and ended in 1998 after volunteers could not be found to take it over, according to a Dayton Daily News article printed on Jan. 24, 1998.