Gene Kelly was originally signed to direct, but exited when he failed to get Warren Beatty and then Bobby Darin to star.

Rock Hudson later said he had disliked the film and thought it was distasteful to make a comedy about death. He recalled, "Right from the start, I hated the script. I just didn't believe in that man for one minute. Making fun of death is difficult and dangerous. That scene where I went out and bought a plot for myself in the cemetery - to me it was completely distasteful."

If you look quickly whenever any characters drive down the "street" where Rock Hudson and Doris Day live, you may spot the "houses" from The Munsters, the Don Knotts vehicle The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, and many other Universal movies and TV shows from the 1960s.

About a month before the film was released, a brief clip, in black and white, was shown on TV's "The Beverly Hillbillies" in the episode "Jed Becomes a Movie Mogul".

George refers to Green Hills, the cemetery where he purchases three plots, as "a Levittown of the hereafter". This reference, likely to be lost on modern audiences and certainly on foreign ones, is to four communities of that name, built by Levitt and Sons, a building firm. These communities, built after the Second World War to address the housing shortage, were noted for the mass production of the suburbs and the homogeneity of the housing designs. The most famous Levittown community is in Nassau County, New York.

Continuity

When Dr. Morrissey is delivering fish to Judy, she mentions that George is dying. Dr. Morrissey starts laughing and sits down, taking his glasses off. In the next shot the glasses are back on.

As George is reading the newspaper during breakfast, the pages facing the camera change from shot to shot, even though he has already laid those sections down.

In the breakfast scene at the beginning of the picture, the level of coffee in Judy's cup constantly changes between shots. Also, the coffee starts out black, then later has cream in it.

The level of the sand in the toy truck that Arnold is filling.

George takes three colored pills before breakfast; the last one being pink. By the next shot, it has turned blue.



Factual errors

Arnold cautions George about cholesterol while eating nuts. Fact is, nuts have no cholesterol.



Revealing mistakes

When Winny calls to hit on Judy, the shot of his face is footage reused from an earlier scene, specifically the one where he first demonstrates his 'foolproof technique.'



Miscellaneous

When Doris Day pulled Paul Lynde away from the door in the final scene, Paul lost his balance (either from tripping over the luggage or from Doris being overzealous) and near fell down. That clearly was not planned, but Paul made a nice recovery and kept the scene going.