Shirley Temple later chose Delmar Watson to play Peter in Heidi because she had worked with him in this film.
During a scene that called for Shirley Temple to hold a tea party in a barn, a mule in the barn began eating the sugar cubes on the table. Director Henry Hathaway recalled, "Shirley was irritated and tried to shoo him away. Then this mule got irritated. He turned around, and with his two back legs he hauled off at her with a kick. Shirley ducked and he missed, but instead of stopping or running away, she strode over and kicked the mule back."
The landslide sequence includes a lot of archive footage from the silent version, To the Last Man, filmed ten years earlier.