Synopsis/Details
Benji Boogerton has spent his whole life trying not to be noticed. So when a single panic-sneeze in Room 12 fires a rope of bright green goo clear across the classroom and pins a poster to the wall, it's officially his worst nightmare — until he realizes nobody saw it come from him. Nobody, that is, except Maya, the relentlessly logical kid one desk over, who arrives at the truth about four seconds before anyone else in the building.
Maya has a theory: you can't control something you're afraid of — you have to understand it. With Benji's chaos-loving best friend Bucky christening them the "Goo Crew," the three start running experiments in Maya's treehouse, mapping the rules of a power that's equal parts physics and feelings. Calm and focus make it small and useful. Panic makes it dangerous. And the goo always, mercifully, vanishes without a trace — which is the only reason Benji's secret survives the arrival of Sterling Snifferberg III, a relentlessly clean new kid with a sanitizing drone and a personal crusade to expose the "Kabooger menace."
When a first-grader dangles from the top of the jungle gym and the grown-ups are too far away, Benji's body moves before his fear can stop it. Hood up, he swings in on a thread of his own goo and pulls off a rescue that turns "the Mystery Hero" into a schoolyard legend — and turns Sterling's suspicion into something sharper. But the closer Sterling gets to the truth, the clearer it becomes that the immaculate new rival is really just a lonely kid trying to keep his world in order for a father who's never around. When Sterling's homemade cleaning machine goes catastrophically wrong in front of the whole school, Benji has to choose between protecting his secret and saving the one person determined to unmask him.
By the end, the Goo Crew has a hero, a name (the correct one), and an unlikely fourth member. What they don't know is that someone has been quietly photographing them since the very first night — and that's a different experiment entirely.
Tone / comps (optional field): Heartfelt, fast, gross-in-a-good-way adventure-comedy in the vein of Hilda, Big Hero 6: The Series, and The Last Kids on Earth, with the secret-identity warmth of classic Spider-Man and a Captain Underpants sense of fun. Built as a serialized-lite "monster/mystery of the week" with a season-long throughline.
