This is the first appearance by Little Audrey. She would make a cameo in a Popeye cartoon "Olive Oyl For President" early in 1948, before inaugurating a new series of her own in June 1948.
Little Audrey, introduced here, was reportedly created as a replacement for Little Lulu. Famous Studios had adapted the comic strip character "Little Lulu" into an animated film series lasting from 1943 to 1948, but found the royalties it had to pay to the strip's owners to be prohibitively high. So the studio decided to create another mischievous little girl as a series protagonist.
The character "Little Audrey" or "Audrey Smith", introduced here, was one of the most popular characters used by Famous Studios and Harvey Comics. She starred in her own animated film series from 1948 to 1958. The comic book version by Harvey Comics lasted from 1952 to 1976. The character has been sporadically revived over the following decades, but she in no longer a major character.
The original design of Little Audrey is credited to Bill Tytla (1904-1968), a character animator who worked for Disney before being hired by Famous Studios. Tytla's main claims to fame are designing and animating the Disney characters Grumpy (one of the Seven Dwarfs), Stromboli (Pinocchio's puppeteer "owner"), Yen Sid (Mickey's mentor and sorcerer in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"), Chernabog (the winged, evil deity from "A Night on Bald Mountain"), and Dumbo the Elephant (the protagonist of the film "Dumbo").
Bill Tytla reportedly used his own daughter Tammy as a reference in his design of Little Audrey.