'Look! I Have a Meat Beard' and Other Highway Mysteries

As a lover of the surreal and the absurd in the everyday, it’s been a pleasure to see those weird red billboards here and there, saying nothing more than oddball things such as, “I Pooted,” “Pretty, pretty. Shiny, shiny,” “My Boogers Itch,” “Clowns Hate Tangelos,” “The Hat Sells the Sandwich” and, of course, “Look! I Have a Meat Beard.”

With no other hint at what’s being sold, we accept them as funny turns of phrases, punch lines to jokes we don’t know or just the kind of weird non sequiturs we expect to hear coming from our favorite cartoon characters.

And we’d be right.

As any fan of their clever shows knows by now, the marvelous and mysterious billboard campaign is from Cartoon Network.

“I have a meat beard” is a catchphrase from an episode of “Camp Lazlo.” See it in its context here.
“Pretty, pretty. Shiny, shiny” is from “My Gym Partner is a Monkey.” The clip is here.

“I pooted,” is something that one of the wackiest new characters on “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends,” name of Cheese, occasionally says. (He has kind of a gas problem). He could have easly been represented by his line “I like chocolate milk,” though that would have been too close to an actual Nestle ad. The clip is here

A bigger star from “Foster’s” is Bloo, who is the source of the “I’m a hot toe picker” phrase. In it, he’s doing variations on a  TV weatherman who says it’s “Hot in Topeka”  as you can see here.

The other cartoon series that merits two billboards is “The Grim Advantures of Billy and Mandy,” which brings us both “My boogers itch” and “Clowns hate tangelos,” which comes from this scene.

The most inscruitable tagline of them all may be “The hat sells the sandwich,” since it’s from a cartoon that doesn’t start on Cartoon Network until this Friday.

“Squirrel Boy” is a pretty funny series from the maker of “Duckman.” In the first episode there’s a long bit about what is the main selling point of their sandwich cart (the squirrel swears it’s his handsome Admiral’s hat).

Because nobody knows this line, or has seen the cartoon yet, my daughter was the smartest one of her bunch since she saw the preview episode with me.

Yes!

(That affirmation, incidentally, comes from “Billy and Mandy” as well from a lovably dense character called Fred Fredburger, who has so far appeared in an episode exactly once).

And now all your highway mysteries are solved. Or at least the ones related to Cartoon Network.