 Norman Reilly Raine's stories of the salty tugboat captain Annie Brennan, a character based on the life of Thea Foss, first appeared in prose form in the weekly US journal "Saturday Evening Post" in the late 1920s.She was soon developed into a movie character, depicted in three films and portrayed by a different actress in each (Marie Dressler in "Tugboat Annie", 1933; Marjorie Rambeau in "Tugboat Annie Sails Again", 1940; and Jane Darwell in "Captain Tugboat Annie", 1945).In 1954, a television series was commissioned by the independent American production company TPA.