Chris Lemmon, son of actor Jack Lemmon (Professor Fate), said in an interview on KMOX-Radio in St. Louis that he considers Lemmon's role in this film to be his father's finest.
Charlton Heston was originally offered the role of The Great Leslie. He considered it a "funny script" but had to turn the part down when the production schedule for The Agony and the Ecstasy was delayed. Tony Curtis then got the part.
A moose head appears to hang on the wall of Professor Fate's (Jack Lemmon's) oddly-decorated dining room. However, when the Professor and Max run out the front door you can see that the rest of the moose stands in the foyer, with just his head poking through a hole in the wall. Ernie Kovacs originally did this gag on one of his TV shows. The fact that Jack Lemmon was a great friend of Kovacs' suggests that this wasn't a coincidence. In addition, the gag goes back at least as far as the 1946 Warner Bros.' cartoon "Kitty Kornered," in which a cat clinging to a moose head is being pulled by Porky Pig, and as a result pulls the entire moose out of the wall.
Both the "Hannibal 8" and the "Leslie Special" are on display in the Hollywood Gallery at The Peterson Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, California. The other "Leslie Special" is on display at the Tupelo Automobile Museum in Tupelo, MS. The Hannibal 8 driven by Professor Fate was powered by a Corvair 6-cylinder engine and 3-speed transmission. Six Hannibal 8 cars were built for the movie at a reported cost of $150,000 each, three of which used the lazy tongs lifting mechanism, so fragile that it broke constantly. The "Leslie Special" was designed and built by the studio using parts from several cars.
During the ballroom scene, Jack Lemmon's character as the crown prince can be seen dancing with one of the military officers.
Features the largest pie fight ever staged, with a running gag that The Great Leslie remains clean while everyone else is covered in pie. Tony Curtis was required to change clothes several times when he was accidentally splattered with debris from a pie that had hit someone else. The pies used during the pie throwing scene were real, containing fruit, custard, whipped cream and other ingredients. Following this scene the crew devoured more than 300 leftover pies.
In the film's press kit, Natalie Wood divulges that she took fencing lessons, sidesaddle lessons and practiced smoking cigars, but her biggest challenge was driving the Stanley Steamer. The steering was difficult ("like turning a tractor, I suspect", she says) and going into reverse was nearly impossible.
Professor Fate's Rocket Car, torpedo, and one of the Hannibal 8's produced for this movie, are located at the Volo Auto Museum in Volo, Illinois. As of January 2010, these three items were for sale for $350,000.
The full name of Tony Curtis's character (The Great Leslie) was "Leslie Galant III".
The ice floe sequence was shot on what is now known as Warner Bros. Sound Stage 16, the biggest and tallest sound stage on the Warner Bros. studio lot. Originally, in the early days of the studio, it was known as Stage 7. If you look closely at the water that surrounds the actors and the automobiles on the slab of ice, you can see a multitude of reflections from the lights on the stage's catwalks. Stage 16 was originally a standard-sized sound stage, but when the studio needed room to film tall-masted ships in its earlier years, the entire stage was jacked up while steel and concrete pilasters were built underneath the structure for added support, doubling the stage's height after the new foundation was poured. Its floor is retractable to reveal a deep flotation tank as well as windowed camera cabins for underwater filming. In "The Great Race," a portion of the gradually "melting ice floe" was attached to cables that kept the slab of "ice" in position and the portion which gradually gave way underneath Professor Fate was pulled down by an underwater diver in the tank.
The name of the Western town where Dorothy Provine sings is "Boracho". "Borracho", pronounced the same way, means "drunkard" in Spanish. Since the reason the race stops in the town is to fuel the cars, or to give the cars a "drink", an additional significance of the name occurs.
This movie is loosely based on an actual 1908 New York-to-Paris race.
Though not specifically stated, this movie takes place between 1901-1909. This was the period Theodore Roosevelt held presidency which in turn is hinted at by Maggie Dubois during her capture in the Potsdorf dungeons.
When Prof. Fate, Max, and Maggie DuBois drive into the Russian town, Maggie repeats to the professor what she had already argued in her first interview with The Great Leslie, that she speaks French, Russian and Arabic. She then speaks a full sentence to the townspeople in Russian. According to her IMDb biography page, Russian is indeed one of the languages Natalie Wood spoke.
When Professor Fate and Max are being chased by the train, the car was attached to the front of the locomotive by a short bar. The track was also prepared so as to protect the car's tires.