Buddy has his origins in the chaos that followed after animators Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising severed their relations with producer Leon Schlesinger. Without his animators and Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid, the star character they had taken with them, Schlesinger was desperate to build his own cartoon studio and maintain his contract with Warner Bros. He lured in several animators from other studios, among them Earl Duvall from Disney. Schlesinger told his new employees to create a star character for the studio, and Duvall created Buddy in 1933, with his first film "Buddy's Day Out" released on September 9.