Joseph Benjamin Harris III was born in Jersey City, New Jersey on January 5, 1928. He served in the Navy and the Marines and graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. In the 1950s, he worked at the advertising firm Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, drawing cartoon mascots and storyboards to sell products like General Mills cereals and Bounty paper towels. He created the Trix cereal rabbit and wrote ad copy including "Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids." As a founding member of Total TeleVision, he drew storyboards and designed characters including King Leonardo, Klondike Kat, Tennessee Tuxedo, and Underdog. The Underdog Show debuted in 1964 and Harris helped turn Underdog into a balloon for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1965. After Total TeleVision stopped making cartoons, he returned to advertising and later wrote and illustrated children's books including The Belly Book. He died on March 26, 2017 at the age of 89.
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