The Dinosaur That Pooped the Bed!

August 1, 2018
Danny's one-trick dino again goes with the flow.Forbidden to watch TV until he's cleaned his room, rightly dubbed "Mount Dumpy," Danny invites his outsized sidekick to hoover up all the toys, dirty clothes, and bric-a-brac. A double crisis ensues, as not only does Dinosaur swell up to the point that the door is blocked ("Then Dan started crying. / His nose dripped with snot. / They were stuck in their room and the TV was not!"), but the inevitable diarrheic deluge redeposits all the junk amid "smelly poo lumps." This eco-disaster seems pretty small scale, considering that in previous outings the dinosaur ...Pooped a Planet (2017) and ...Pooped the Past (2018), and the poo in Parsons' antiseptic cartoons barely twitches the gross-o-meter. It just looks like pumpkin-pie filling and fails to stick even a little to Danny's possessions, as they emerge unaffected by their passage through the dinosaur's bowels. Moreover, once the poo's out, rather than go for more alimentary gags, the authors just skip ahead to a disingenuous moral: "You can't watch cartoons if your bedroom's not clean!" Danny and his family present white.A thin-sauce, phoned-in sequel. (Picture book. 4-6)

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