The Butter Battle Book - Plot

Plot

The Butter Battle Book tells the story of a land where two hostile cultures, the Yooks and the Zooks, live on opposite sides of a long curving wall, fairly similar to the Berlin Wall. The Yooks wear blue clothes; the Zooks wear orange. The main dispute between the two cultures is that the Yooks eat their bread with the butter-side up, while the Zooks eat their bread with the butter-side down. The conflict between the two sides leads to an escalating arms race, each competing to make bigger and better weapons to outdo the other, which results in the threat of mutual assured destruction.

The race begins when a Zook named Van Itch slingshots the Yooks' "Tough-Tufted Prickly Snick-Berry Switch", which could be used to give Zooks a twitch if they dared to come close to the wall, which was guarded by "the Zook-Watching Border Patrol". The Yooks then develop a machine with three slingshots interlinked, called a "Triple-Sling Jigger". This works once (Van Itch got scared and ran off), but the Zooks counterattack with their own creation: The "Jigger-Rock Snatchem", a machine with three nets to fling the rocks fired from the Triple-Sling Jigger back at the Yooks' side "just as fast as we catch 'em".

The Yooks then discover that slingshots are old-fashioned, and create a gun called the "Kick-A-Poo Kid", loaded with "powerful Poo-A-Doo powder and ants' eggs and bees' legs and dried-fried clam chowder", and toted by a dog named Daniel, the country's "first gun-toting spaniel". The Zooks counterattack with an "Eight-Nozzled Elephant-Toted Boom Blitz", a machine that shoots "high-explosive sour cherry stone pits, and will put your dumb Kick-A-Poo Kid on the fritz!"

The Yooks then devise a machine called the "Utterly Sputter", a large blue mecha with two very tall mechanical legs, a cabin which resembles that of a helicopter's, but with no rotors, and four faucets on the back, whose main purpose was to "sprinkle blue goo all over the Zooks!". But the Zooks counterattack with a Sputter identical to the Yooks'. Eventually, each side possesses a small but extremely destructive red bomb called the "Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo", the smallest weapon of all, and neither has any defense against it. The TV special (see below) demonstrates the development of the weapon in a mysterious, and somewhat frightening, mad scientist-style song (complete with living goo, floating rings, ghosts, snakes, and chemical flasks which imitate volcanoes).

No resolution is reached by the book's end, with the generals of both sides on the wall poised to drop their bombs and waiting to see who will do it first. The question is left hanging for the reader to answer by his or her actions, much like the question "UNLESS" at the end of Dr. Seuss' book, The Lorax. The book thus departs from the commonly-accepted approach to children's writing, of positive themes and resolution of the plot's conflict by the end of the story.