Dinosaurs Love Underpants

March 1, 2010
Fans of Aliens Wear Underpants will revel in this companion volume's dotty humor and pell-mell action. The tongue-in-cheek story purports to solve the mystery of why dinosaurs disappeared, and the slapstick illustrations are filled with details to tickle a dino-sized funny bone. Cort pictures a circle of bearded cavemen (including one holding a well-placed fig leaf) watching underwear being invented by one of their companions, who wears leopard-print briefs. The primary colored dinosaurs quickly become underwear obsessed, and sport underwear decorated with flowers, swirls, and wooly mammoth fur, which causes all manner of problems (including fighting over who gets to wear what). The rhythmical pattern of Freedman's text sometimes breaks down, and her rhymes are occasionally slant ("itchy" rhymes with "pinchy"). But the overstated humor of the illustrations is infectious as, in the end, the dinosaur "fighting got so crazy,/ All the dinos were wiped out!" Closing illustrations feature a modern boy putting on dinosaur-decorated briefs while the narrator cautions to treat undies "with great care./ Don't forget briefs saved Mankind./ They're not just underwear!" Ages 4-7.

January 1, 2010
PreS-Freedman and Cort offer another homage to underpants. Cartoons in bright colors and patterns pep up the rhymed tale that explains the demise of dinosaurs. According to Freedman, "When T. rex saw man's undies, /He roared with deafening rants./I don't want to eat you up./I want your underpants." All dinosaurs follow the obsessive fad, escalating to a manic dino tug-of-war that wipes out every order, saving mankind. Despite the skimpy plot, preschoolers will giggle as itchy or tight briefs annoy Stegosaurus or Diplodocus, while theft victim cavemen shyly cover up with huge leaves or the few remaining pairs of underwear."Gay Lynn Van Vleck, Henrico County Library, Glen Allen, VA"

Copyright 2010 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2009
Preschool-G As long as you can suspend all sense of evolution, literature, and good taste and are of a single-digit age, youll crack up with hysterics at this theory of dinosaur extinction from the creators of Aliens Love Underpants (2007). According to the story, cavemen began to feel embarrassed in the nude, and so they dreamed up underpants, which the dinos coveted and copied, creating a mass frenzy that escalated into a Mighty Underpants War and the end of the giant beasts. Once again, the rhyming text and illustrations turn this into a comic delight.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2010
Finally, a sound explanation for dinosaurs' extinction: their obsession with cavemen's underpants led to "a great briefs tug-of-war," during which the dinos were done in. It's all so hilariously ridiculous that readers won't mind if Freedman's rhymes sometimes lose the beat. Cort employs some fierce colors in his amusing illustrations of underwear-clad men and beasts.

(Copyright 2010 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)