The Chinese gong in Dr. Yes's hideout appears a few weeks later in a Chinese restaurant where Max goes to meet Dr. T.
James Komack, Director of this episode, played photographer "Uncle Norman" on MGM's "The Courtship of Eddie's Father".
During the cold open, Max, 99, and the Chief are in the control room with an American general and a German scientist during the countdown for a rocket launch, with overheard launch instructions given first in English, and then in German. When 99 asks why the instructions are repeated in German, Max replies that it must be the language that America's best scientists understand.
Max's reply is a laugh line, but it is also a true statement. After World War Two, both the United States and the Soviet Union competed to recruit the scientists and engineers who built the deadly V-1 and V-2 rockets used by Nazi Germany near the end of the war. America's Project Paperclip brought many of those personnel into the United States; an actual paperclip was attached to the dossiers of those Germans with questionable, even criminal wartime records as a veiled indication that their records needed to be sanitized in order to enter the US.
The best-known of them was Wernher von Braun, who became a top official in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and is known as the "father of the American lunar program" that landed 12 US astronauts on the Moon. Von Braun had also been an officer in the Nazi German Schutzstaffel (SS) who was promoted three times during the war. A civic center in Huntsville, Alabama, location of a key NASA facility, is named for von Braun.
Max's reply is a laugh line, but it is also a true statement. After World War Two, both the United States and the Soviet Union competed to recruit the scientists and engineers who built the deadly V-1 and V-2 rockets used by Nazi Germany near the end of the war. America's Project Paperclip brought many of those personnel into the United States; an actual paperclip was attached to the dossiers of those Germans with questionable, even criminal wartime records as a veiled indication that their records needed to be sanitized in order to enter the US.
The best-known of them was Wernher von Braun, who became a top official in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and is known as the "father of the American lunar program" that landed 12 US astronauts on the Moon. Von Braun had also been an officer in the Nazi German Schutzstaffel (SS) who was promoted three times during the war. A civic center in Huntsville, Alabama, location of a key NASA facility, is named for von Braun.