Love Potion

by Steven Banks, Natasha Sasic (Illustrator)

Jimmy shows off his latest invention -- a love potion -- to Carl and Sheen. Anyone exposed to it will fall in love with the first person he or she sees. Jimmy thinks his potion is stored safely in the containment chamber, but Carl accidentally opens it -- and love is literally in the air, exposing them all Even worse, Cindy Vortex is the first girl Jimmy sees Will Jimmy be able to reverse the effects of his latest invention, or will love conquer all?

24 pages, Paperback

First published December 23, 2003

About the author

Steven Banks has numerous writing and acting credits. He has been a head writer for several Nickelodeon series including "The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron", "The Fairly Odd Parents", "CatDog", and "Sponge Bob Square Pants". His play, "Love Tapes," co-written with Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller fame), was recently performed at the Sacred Fools Theater in Hollywood. And he created, wrote, produced, and starred as himself in "The Steven Banks Show," a comedy series which aired on PBS in the 90s.

Reviews

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm going to try to keep this review brief since this book is only about 24 pages long and meant for children who are also fans of the show "The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius" (which means the right time for the appropriate age group to read this is...when this book was released, almost twenty years ago) and for a book that is meant to appeal to fans of the show, it does do a great job.

The art is colorful - all unique illustrations drawn for this book's story - and I think all of the character designs in the TV show translate very well into 2D. I always found Jimmy Neutron's design not as good as the superior animated child genius Dexter from Dexter's lab, but he looks really good here. Cindy's the only character who looks kinda weird in this format but I think it's more to do with the proportions of her character design than any fault of the illustrator.

The plot synopsis from the back of the book is completely wrong, by the way, and the actual plot is even more bonkers. No love potion is involved at all. Instead, Jimmy Neutron has isolated the pheromone that makes boys fall in love with girls (which is a bright pink color, because pink = girl), and what he wants to do with it is make something called "the anti-girl vaccine", either to eliminate the girl gender altogether or to eliminate his own attraction for girls, therefore chemically removing his heterosexuality. There's no non-weird way to read this invention.

However, before he can do that, Carl accidentally opens the containment unit that's housing the pheromones and Jimmy, Carl, and Sheen all breathe in the girl vapors and proceed to become infatuated with the first girls that they see. In fitting with the established canon of the show, Jimmy falls in love with Cindy, Sheen falls in love with Libby, and Carl falls in love with Jimmy's mom and awkwardly flirts with her with her husband in full view.

What happens next is a silly picture book of boys cartoonishly terrorizing girls with their undying loyalty and marriage pledges until Jimmy Neutron realizes that something is amiss and then uses his giant brain to fix the problem that he sorta caused in the first place. The End.

Not winning any literary awards, but it fits the tone of the show perfectly.

I just love that Jimmy Neutron was planning on making something called "the anti-girl vaccine". We really gotta unpack that suitcase there, Jimbo.