Since about 2005, a piece of misinformation about Pete the Pup has been spreading across the Internet. It may have started with the Wikipedia page, but even if it didn't, that page has clearly been the main catalyst. Any time someone writes something about Pete, they seem to check Wikipedia, see the same bad information, and often copy and paste it. It's even made its way into a couple of print books. The claim is this: that the original Pete the Pup - the dog who appeared in the Our Gang series between 1927 and 1930, and who had previously appeared in the Buster Brown series - was Pal the Wonder Dog. This simply isn't true. Anyone with a Newspapers.com subscription can disprove it in 15 to 30 minutes by searching for Harry Lucenay in 1920s articles. It's that obvious.

But how did this mistake happen? The person who first made the claim never laid out their reasoning, so we can't know for sure. But it's the kind of conclusion you might reach if you only had three things in front of you: the Roach Our Gang talkies on video, Maltin & Bann's Our Gang book, and a pedigree chart that can be found online.

From the Our Gang shorts, you can see there were were multiple Petes. It's not difficult to notice that the original Pete was replaced in 1930, and that his replacement was, in turn, replaced in 1932.

From Maltin & Bann, you'd learn that Harry Lucenay owned and trained both the original Pete and his 1930 replacement, but not the 1932 dog. That one was trained by Tony Campanaro and probably belonged to Hal Roach. You'd also learn that Pete's father was Pal the Wonder Dog, also owned and trained by Lucenay, and that Pal supposedly preceded Pete in the Our Gang series.

From the pedigree chart, you'd see that a dog called Lucenay's Peter was born on Sep. 6, 1929 - about the right age to be the dog who replaced the original Pete in 1930.

From this very limited set of facts, you could easily jump to the following conclusion: that Lucenay's Peter was the Pete who appeared between 1930 and 1932, and that only one of these dogs could "really" be named Pete. If Pete's father, Pal, actually did precede him in the series, then the original Pete must actually have been Pal the Wonder Dog. On paper, that all hangs together.

But there are at least three fatal problems with this conclusion.

First, photos of Pal the Wonder Dog - while not exactly common - are available online, and he simply doesn't look like the original Pete.

Second, Maltin & Bann were wrong about Pal preceding Pete in the Our Gang series. There was a dog named Pal who preceded the original Pete and appeared between 1924 and 1927, but he wasn't Lucenay's dog. He belonged to Campanaro and looked nothing like Pal the Wonder Dog. This is almost certainly the dog that the authors were referring to, but if so, they must not have seen a photo of Lucenay's Pal before making that claim.

Third, the pedigree chart originally identified the father of Lucenay's Peter as Tudor's Black Jack. At least, it did around 2005. It has since been altered since then to comform to the Wikipedia article and the websites that have repeated the misinformation. On my computer, I have a file last modified on Apr. 12, 2006 (I'm writing this in 2026) that preserves the chart as it existed then. Here's what it shows:

Twenty years ago, the Wikipedia page claimed that Tudor's Black Jack was simply another name for Pal the Wonder Dog. Eventually someone realized how little sense this made - not only would the dog have two names, but the owner would too - so the page was revised to say that Tudor's Black Jack was Pal's father instead. The problem is that the name Tudor's Black Jack came from the pedigree chart, which originally listed him as the father of Lucenay's Peter, not Pal. But no worries: the pedigree chart has since been altered to conform to the Wikipedia article. Don't you love it when that happens? Tudor's Black Jack has been removed from Peter's chart and replaced by Pal the Wonder Dog, and Bruce's Battle Jr. has been replaced by a version of Tudor's Black Jack with an entirely different ancestry than the one shown twenty years ago. On Lucenay's Peter's maternal side, everything is unchanged, but Keller's Peggy O'Neal now appears twice, once as Pal's mate and once as his mother, with identical ancestry in both positions.

© Robert Demoss.