An uncredited Peter Mayhew is the live suit actor stand-in for the stop-motion Minaton (the bronze mechanical minotaur), whose name is a portmanteau of "minotaur" and "automaton." Before filming, Mayhew was a hospital attendant at King's College Hospital in London. Producer Charles H. Schneer saw Mayhew's photo, in which he was literally standing above the crowd around him. This was Mayhew's very first role, right before his more famous role of Chewbacca in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977). Both films were released in 1977, and "Star Wars" was released three months before this film.
After the live action filming was done, it took animator Ray Harryhausen almost 1½ years to do the animation, all from his own home studio.
Animator Ray Harryhausen was forced to create a mechanical baboon. An actual baboon would have been difficult, if not impossible, to train.
At $3.5 million, this film was the costliest of the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad trilogy. It was also the second costliest Harryhausen film in general, behind his next and last film, Clash of the Titans (1981), which cost $15 million.
An actor in make-up originally was to play the Troglodyte but animator Ray Harryhausen said they were striving for "that fantasy effect that King Kong (1933) had, that wonderful never-neverland of fantasy." So he created the creature himself.