This is the first three-color Technicolor feature to be released by Universal Pictures in the U.S.A.
A version of Ko Ko's famous patter song "I've got a little list" was shot for the film but ultimately deleted because of its controversial (for the time) depiction of Adolf Hitler and reference to Neville Chamberlain. This deleted scene can be viewed on the Criterion Collection DVD.
Sir W.S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan's comic opera "The Mikado or, The Town of Titipu" was their ninth of fourteen collaborations. It opened on March 14, 1885 in London at the Savoy Theatre and ran for 672 performances.
This film is part of the Criterion Collection, spine #559.
Except for the California-born Kenny Baker, who the same year appeared in the Marx Brothers' "At the Circus," most of the cast were members of the London-based D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, which was the original producers of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas and held the copyright in them until 1961.