Travis and Freddy's Adventures in Vegas (review)

Travis and Freddy are complete opposites and best friends, having been born in the same hospital on the same day. Travis is the sporty one with the killer smile, and Freddy is the dorky-looking one with a brain the size of a planet. Freddy has developed a system that uses a pair of goofy glasses with a tiny camera and microphone that transmit anything the wearer sees to Freddy at a remote location, whence Freddy can then communicate his superior knowledge back to the wearer. The glasses are to get Travis through his Waterloo—math tests—but when Travis' dad loses big (as in the house, and everything) on a bet gone bad, Freddy decides they need to take their act to Vegas. With quick thinking and more than a little luck, they finagle their way onto a plane and land in the care of a hot and sassy cab driver, who has her own reasons for helping them beat the house in blackjack. They win large, then lose larger as they run afoul of a diminutive but still dangerous gangster; fortunately, Freddy never runs out of ideas and Travis is a dead eye with maraschino cherries, so all ends well for the good guys. Johnson and Hoppe are comic masters of dudester boyspeak and polysyllabic mobster vocabulosity, and readers will be drawn helplessly along as the boys' zany antics and uncanny in-sync-ness get them in and out of one hyperbolic scrape after another. Fans of Captain Underpants (Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets, BCCB 5/99) will swear they've met these guys before, so turn 'em on to this when they are ready to move up to more complicated, but no less silly, plotlines.