Trivia

The final Harvest Moon number was shot in Technicolor while the rest of the film was black/white. This was because of shortages of material needed for color stock due to the war. Studios used their limited color stock for their top films. 16mm television prints were in B&W and the Technicolor sequence was not restored until the 1980s.

Originally planned to be filmed entirely in Technicolor.

During World War II, audiences were hungry for happy stories, and this story got a makeover. The real-life Jack Norworth and Nora Bayes were married vaudeville and Broadway stars but their union was short-lived from 1908, ending in 1913, and each married three more times. As songwriters, their most famous collaboration was "Shine on, Harvest Moon," which they wrote and introduced in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1908. Director David Butler later recalled the attitude of studio executives during the war: "Never mind the story. Just give me 8,000 feet of film."

Unfortunately for the cast, many critics still remembered the real Norworth and Bayes fondly (Norworth, in fact, was still alive when the film was released, and still performed occasionally). At the time as a result, critics were less than enthusiastic overall.

In current times, the terms of vaudeville and honky-tonk have little meaning. Predecessor to today's cabaret or nightclub, Honky-tonk originally referred to disreputable, bawdy variety shows in the West and to the theaters housing them. Their prices were cheaper and had no pretense of class, often attached to a gambling house, and always a bar. Wyatt Earp wrote about them in the cowtowns of Kansas, Nebraska, and Montana in the 1870s and 1880s.

Robert Shayne would later play Inspector Henderson in Adventures of Superman (1952). In Shine on Harvest Moon (1944), Shayne played Dan Costello.