Joe Harris, Illustrator Behind Underdog and Trix Rabbit, Dies at 89

[JSngry]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/arts/television/joe-harris-dead-created-underdog-trix-rabbit.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fobituaries&action=click&contentCollection=obituaries&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=0

In the 1950s Mr. Harris worked at the advertising firm Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, drawing cartoon mascots and storyboards to sell products like General Mills cereals and Bounty paper towels.

In the late 1950s he created a floppy-eared white cartoon rabbit to sell Trix, a fruit-flavored, multicolored version of General Mills’s more popular Kix. He also drew a storyboard and wrote ad copy, including “Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids,” words that became synonymous with the cereal.

After seeing Mr. Harris’s ideas in 1959, Chet Stover, who was creative director on the Trix account, wrote a memo to the company that said, “In a business where the only thing we have to sell are ideas, it is of first importance the credit is given where credit belongs — and Joe gets all the credit for this one.”

Mr. Harris joined Mr. Stover; W. Watts Biggers, an account manager at Dancer; and Treadwell Covington, who worked at a direct-mail agency, to form Total TeleVision, a company that would make Saturday morning cartoons to compete for General Mills’s business with cartoons by Jay Ward and Bill Scott, who created a show centering on the characters Rocky & Bullwinkle.

Mr. Stover and Mr. Biggers were the main writers; Mr. Covington handled audio recording; Mr. Harris drew storyboards and designed characters like King Leonardo, Klondike Kat and Tennessee Tuxedo.

The best known of these characters was Underdog, who was transformed from a canine version of a shoeshiner into a superhero, usually when the reporter Sweet Polly Purebred was threatened by villains, including the evil scientist Simon Bar Sinister and the natty wolf gangster Riff Raff.

He said interest in the “Underdog” show remained high, even decades after the last episode ran. As he told The Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina in 2007, “Anytime I’m out in public, people always say, ‘Here’s a piece of paper, draw Underdog for me, will you?’ ”

[JSngry]

This guy probably reached more people than John Coltrane, with less name recognition, but probably with several buttloads more money.

Who among us has not eaten at least one bowl of Trix, and who would have done so had it not been for the rabbit?

And more importantly, who among us is not a fan of Wally Cox?

[Jazzmoose]

Sorry;in today's political climate, it's not wise to support people who advocate the use of Super Energy Pills...