Little Audrey (full name: Audrey Smith) is a fictional character, appearing in early 20th century folklore prior to starring in a series of Paramount Pictures' Famous Studios cartoons from 1947 to 1958. She is considered a variation of the better-known Little Lulu, devised after Paramount decided not to renew the license on the comic strip character created by Marjorie Henderson Buell (a.k.a. "Marge"). Despite some superficial similarities between the two characters, the Famous animators were at pains to design Audrey in contrast to Lulu, adopting an entirely different color scheme and employing the stylistic conventions common to Famous Studios' later 1940s repertoire, as opposed to Buell's individualistic rendering of Little Lulu. Veteran animator Bill Tytla was the designer of Little Audrey, reportedly inspired by his daughter Tammy (who was also his inspiration for Famous' version of Little Lulu, on which he also worked and for which he directed several shorts). The original voice of Little Lulu was performed by actress Cecil Roy (who also provided the voice of Casper the Friendly Ghost). Little Audrey was, instead, voiced by Mae Questel, who also voiced most of Paramount's other major female cartoon characters, including Betty Boop and Olive Oyl from the Popeye cartoons. History Prior to her adoption by Famous in 1947, Little Audrey had a long career in folklore as the butt of a series of mostly heartless jokes, some going as far back as the First World War. In folklore and juvenile humor According to B.A. Botkin's A Treasury of American Folktales: One of the most famous goes like this: Pierre Berton, in The Dionne Years: A Thirties Melodrama (1978), offers this example of a Little Audrey joke as was in fashion around the time of the Dionne quintuplets' birth in 1934: Animated cartoons Audrey first appeared in the Noveltoon Santa's Surprise (1947), where she was the most prominent member of a multicultural child cast working to clean Santa's workshop while he was asleep, and was briefly seen in the January 1948 Popeye cartoon Olive Oyl for President. Her first appearance in her own series was the short Butterscotch and Soda, released on July 16, 1948. In common with many animated shorts of the period, childlike fantasy played an important role in Audrey's early cartoons, which often used dream sequences as the basis of the storylines. In this way, Audrey could attend a wedding in Cakeland (Tarts and Flowers, 1950),