After Frank Loesser's "Baby, It's Cold Outside" was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, other songwriters protested because Loesser originally had written it in 1944 as a duet for himself and his wife to sing at parties, and they argued that it, therefore, should not be counted as an "original" song. The Academy, though, ruled that since the song never had been performed professionally before it appeared in the film, it was eligible, and it went on to win the award.
A specially built, one-of-a-kind piano had been used during the early filming, but halfway through production, it mysteriously disappeared from the set. Metro boss Louis B. Mayer was very upset at the lack of security and the increased production costs this would mean. Red Skelton told the studio head that he had an identical piano at home and would be willing to rent it to the studio. Mayer didn't believe him until Skelton drove him to his apartment to see it. An ecstatic Mayer offered $50 per diem for its use, but Red held out for $1000 a day. Faced with the prospect of keeping production waiting while a new one was built to order or reshooting the earlier scenes, Mayer capitulated. It never occurred to him that Skelton had stolen it with the aid of stagehands, with whom he split the money.
In a 1999 interview, Esther Williams recalled that she and Ricardo Montalban originally were supposed to sing Frank Loesser's song, "I'd Love to Get You (On a Slow Boat to China)" in this film. But MGM's censors rejected the song as too suggestive. (Strangely, they interpreted "get" as "have" in a sexual sense.) When Williams asked Loesser for a new song, he offered the now-classic, "Baby, It's Cold Outside". The MGM censors offered no objection to it, even though Williams thought the lyrics were even more suggestive than "Slow Boat To China". Nearly 70 years later, in 2018, radio stations in Cleveland and San Francisco banned the song on the basis that it was too suggestive and contained implications of sexual harassment.
In this film, Esther Williams plays a swimsuit designer. She later copied several designs from this film for a line of swimwear that she would create.
This features a rare on-camera appearance by legendary voice actor Mel Blanc. He speaks in a Mexican accent close to the Speedy Gonzales voice he would begin using four years later for Warner Bros. cartoons. It's also an even rarer on-camera appearance in color.