YMMV / Little Audrey

• Accidental Innuendo: After waking up from her nightmare in "The Lost Dream", Audrey shouts "No more moonshine for me!"
• Adaptation Displacement: Audrey is rare example of a cartoon character having a first appearance in animation while being more well-known in the comics. She starred in 16 shorts (along with one cameo in a Popeye cartoon) spread across 12 years. Her run across St. John Publications and Harvey combined lasted from 1948 to 1976.
• Common Knowledge: A popular theory indicates that Paramount created Little Audrey as a replacement for Little Lulu. This is only half true. Audrey was intended to replace Lulu as a character but not for the purpose of a standalone series. Instead, Paramount spun Screen Songs off from Noveltoons to close the gap.
• Fair for Its Day: Audrey's nanny, physical appearance-wise, comes across as a racist caricature to modern viewers, but her portrayal was actually quite progressive back in the day when minorities in fiction tended to be either childish or moronic. Nanny displays no such offensive traits, and instead acts as a good role model and parental figure for Audrey.
• Harsher in Hindsight: A gag in "The Lost Dream" depicts a little boy's dream where a schoolhouse catches fire and burns to the ground. Nearly ten years after the cartoon's release, 92 children and three teachers were killed in the Our Lady of the Angels School fire.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In "Dizzy Dishes" the comic Audrey is reading is called Space Ace.
  • Also, Classic Media would come to own both the Little Lulu and Little Audrey properties. Remember that Audrey was created as a Suspiciously Similar Substitute for Lulu when Famous Studios got tired of paying for the rights to make Lulu shorts.
• Nightmare Fuel: "Butterscotch and Soda" has the Nightmare Sequence of Audrey being chased by menacing candies singing about her "Tummy Ache Blues". The song ends with her being force-fed all the candy she bagged throughout the dream.
• Recycled Script: Song of the Birds is a remake of a 1935 short which instead had a nameless boy as the main character.
• Tear Jerker: Like the original 1935 Fleischer version of "Song of the Birds", it also happens in the remake with Audrey shooting the bird down, feeling guilty thinking she killed it. And like the original, it gets better in the end.
• Toy Ship: Audrey and Melvin in the comics.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Mother Goose's goal in "Goofy Goofy Gander" was to teach Audrey that nursery rhymes can be modern. The cartoon was made in 1950, so it spoofed music and artists of the time such as jazz/bebop and Frank Sinatra respectively. Didn't help that rock and roll had taken off by the end of the decade.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Quite prolifically in Audrey's case, it was once regarded as merely cute and neither obscene nor suggestive for a pre-teen girl to show a bit of underwear.
  • The scene where a boy dreams about his school being set on fire in "The Lost Dream" would be unthinkable these days, since that would indicate serious psychological problems.
  • Earlier Audrey cartoons feature Petunia, a stereotypical black maid character as her caretaker, similar to the one in Tom and Jerry. As with Tom and Jerry, cartoons with Petunia are edited to remove her appearances in reruns or removed from airing altogether.
  • In "Santa's Surprise", Audrey and a group of children from around the world decide to show Santa kindness by cleaning his house. Said children are represented as stereotypes that are wildly racist by today's standards, in particular the Hawaiian girl and the black and Chinese boys.

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