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.
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