When Fred Waring was approached to play a starring role in this film, he brought his famous glee club, The Pennsylvanians, to the shoot and planned on using the college glee club from Pomona College for additional singers. When he arrived at the campus he found the Glee Club conductor was ill but his replacement was a young, energetic man named Robert Shaw. After the movie was finished, Shaw followed Waring to New York, where he founded the Collegiate Chorale and the Robert Shaw Chorale. Robert Shaw went on to be one of the most important personalities in American choral music in the 20th century.
About 40 minutes were removed for the 1942 re-release, and, to date, this seems to be the only version which has publicly survived.
In the epic Busby Berkeley finale with all the precision movement to the singing of the college alma maters, much of the "card-section" sequence was reversed to make the precision look even greater.
Starting with the men flipping the square cards, when the women catch them, they were actually throwing them (the film played backwards to improve their "aim".
Later, when the band starts each school song, a football is passed down to one of the stars, that person passes or laterals the ball to the card section, and from the ball coming in for an impossibly precise "catch" to the end of that card section sequence, the film is being run backwards. It happens the same way for each and every alma mater - filmed from final formation, show movement, regrouping into the swarm and the ball being thrown by the same person out of the center of the blob).
Fred Waring created an archive for his music library, recordings, photographs, films, correspondence and ephemera in the Special Collections department in the library at Pennsylvania State University.