Outdoor toilet display features humanized poop character 'Excreman'

HONG KONG, Dec. 4 (UPI) -- A toilet manufacturer is drawing attention to its products in an unusual way with an outdoor installation featuring cartoon poop characters sitting on commodes.

TOTO Hong Kong is promoting its new "smart toilets" by showing off the multicolored thrones outside the World Trade Center in Hong Kong with statues of a cartoon character named "Excreman" -- an anthropomorphic pile of dung bearing a resemblance to a brown snowman-- sitting on some of the toilets.

Visitors to the installation are being offered rolls of toilet paper branded with Excreman's likeness and the words, "Excreman's [expletive]-y garden -- a fecal pleasure hunt and toilet roll."

Some visitors to the installation objected to the perceived vulgarity, as the Cantonese version of Excreman's name is roughly equivalent to an English-language profanity oft-used as a euphemism for feces.

The company said Excreman was created 10 years ago by Brian Tse Lap-mun and Alice Mak Ka-bik and stars in a three-part book series about his life in the sewers and his dreams of being fertilizer for plants.

"Excreman may seem like a vulgar name, but it's supposed to represent the humble nature of people on the lower rungs of society who have aspirations, but often find themselves bogged down by the realities in life," the character's Facebook page states.