I think those are modern. I've seen others and it's joking about cats making bad decisions, usually involving alcohol.
"I'm Buster Brown and I live in a shoe. That's my dog, Tige &
he lives there too!"
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In 1904, the World’s Fair was held in St. Louis. The Brown Shoe Company built a model of a state-of-the-art shoe factory so that visitors could witness how shoes were made. While visiting other exhibits at the fair, John Bush, the Brown employee, came upon Richard Fenton Outcault, the cartoonist who was famous for the exceedingly popular Hogan’s Alley comic strip. Outcault was a smart self-marketer. At the fair, he rented a booth to sell licensing rights to his latest characters, Buster Brown and his dog, Tige. To attract attention to the booth, he hired a little person and the fellow’s dog to dress as Buster Brown and Tige.
Bush realized that connecting the Buster Brown character and theBrown Shoe Company could be a hit. Bush paid Outcault $200 for licensing rights to use the Buster Brown name and image on children’s shoes. Buster Brown had a sweetheart named Mary Jane, so the Brown Shoe Company also bought licensing rights for “Mary Jane” for their line of girls’ strap shoes
Buster became a multimedia star starting in the twenties, in a series of popular two-reel short subjects starring child actor Arthur Trimble as Buster Brown, with "Pal," a trained pit bull owned by Harry Lucenay, appearing in many of the films as Tige.
These films, many of them directed by Gus Meins, were intended as competition to Hal Roach's "Our Gang," a series which Meins himself would direct in 1933-34. Pal, of course, moved over to the Roach lot for a better contract and a featured role in the Our Gang series as "Pete."
Both Meins and Trimble came to sad ends. Meins was accused of molesting a group of teenage boys in 1940, and rather than face the charges in court, drove up into the hills behind his home and killed himself. Eight years later, Arthur Trimble -- now a troubled 32-year-old man -- shot and killed his wife and then himself.
Pete, meanwhile, was murdered by poison by someone on the Roach lot in 1930, leaving one of his puppies to take over the dog role in the Gang films. Nobody's ever written about a "Buster Brown Curse," but maybe they should.
